Biography

B.A. Film & Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

My undergraduate thesis (“Situating the Social: The Social Problem Film in Postwar America”) examines two independently produced American Social Problem films, Ida Lupino’s Not Wanted (1949) and Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957), and situates them in a discussion of the ways in which American society was articulated in the postwar period as an imagined, yet figurable, community. In so doing, I considered the film’s representational strategy of metonymic narrative – the telling of a local, individual story as paradigmatic and symptomatic of a systemic societal issue – as a method of constructing a form of popular sociology where American society is rendered intelligible as an amorphous whole.

My research now centers around the production of historical knowledge and the representation of history through cinema, particularly as it relates to the films of DEFA, the East German film studio. I wish to explore how the representation of history is experimented with in various DEFA films and how they articulate the possibility of alternatives to a capitalist mode of production.

Areas of interest:

• Marxist/materialist critique
• Globalization and local cultural production
• Critical Theory and The Frankfurt School
  • Theodor Adorno, negative dialetics and non-identity
  • Walter Benjamin and the critique of imperialism
• Organizations of resistance and technologies of communication