Modern Language Association (2023)
“‘Franchement, je déteste lire’: ‘Usefulness’, diverse identities, and re-thinking reading in the French language classroom.”
[Project Abstract]
Center for Race and Gender Grant (2022)
Banlieues Bleues: Girl/womanhood, néo-négritude, and the peripheral communion.
[Project Proposal]
Louisiana State University (2022)
“Essential work: Race, gender, and spaces of the bonne in French Banlieue Film.”
[Conference Abstract]
Selected Research Repository
(links are under construction — thank you for your patience!)
Pacific-Atlantic MLA (2022)
“Audience’s baby, Mama’s maybe: On pornography, conception, and embodiments of shame in Marie NDiaye’s Rosie Carpe.”
[Conference Abstract]
Law and Humanities Group (2021)
Sponsored by the Berkeley-Mellon New Strategies Honorarium.
[Project Resumé]
Transformative Justice Group (2021)
Sponsored by the Berkeley Future Histories Lab in partnership with Just Cities.
[Project Resumé]
Bande de Filles (2014)
South-Atlantic MLA (2020)
“‘Boys’ Law’: Black girlhood and the aesthetics of resistance in Bande de Filles.”
[Conference Abstract]
Taken by self.
Sorbonne Capstone (2017)
Funded through the University of Texas at Austin, Poyner Fellowship at URM Centre Roland Mousnier (2017).
[Capstone Resumé]
Taken by self.
Senior Honors Thesis (2016)
Winner of Senior Honors Thesis Award (2017)
[Thesis Resumé + Abstract]
Some of my favorite non-circulated papers:
They didn’t go beyond Sather Gate, but that’s just how they’re meant to be. I appreciate them no less.
(2020) “Wesh, Bien ou Quoi?”: Youth, Language and Identity in a French Context
Written for a course on the History of French Language, this un-essay sketched out a 15 week-long course on the establishment of “youth speak” in a Francophone context. The collaborative seminar explores how to define youth or the jeune across borders; how youth inform and are informed by legal establishments and regulation/standardization; how youth innovate language through the advent of then- (and now-) novel technologies such as 19th century film or the “living” internet archive.
(2019) Break-olage: On Dance, Community and French Hip Hop Television
How were French communities built through American bboying’s introduction to spaces such as the banlieue? How did the American Hip Hop street form – one considered ‘outside of the law’ – carve out a space in the highly-artified and regulated world of the French dance scene? In this paper, I traced out how the advent of Hip Hop TV fostered communion for the young banlieusard through the televisions’s ‘invisible communities’ alongside kinetic didactics of the breakdancing show H.I.P. H.O.P. (1984).
(2019) #SWIRL: Eros, Race and Networked Selves in the New Media Melodrama
This essay’s primary goal was to flesh out the historical trajectory up to modern conceptions of the networked self that bastion social media’s fixation on the #Swirl (a term for interracial influencer couples), one which finds its beginnings in media’s early fantasies of miscegenation. A secondary portion of this analysis, tracked the exchange between the mediatized couple and their followers, who are disproportionately American Black women. How does a visual representation of mixed love inform or become informed by race relations off-screen? Further, how can we understand a racialized age where vloggers are near-forced to produce a mixed-race child “for the ‘gram” under the directorial (and fetishistic) influence of their viewers?
*I am now developing a side project on mixed-race children, internet fetishism, and the possibility of a New Media Coogan law.