RESEARCH

I believe that research, whether conducted at a major research institution or in a liberal arts setting focused primarily on teaching, is an integral component to maintaining a vibrant and stimulating intellectual environment among both students and faculty. My own interests and approach toward research has been greatly influenced by my training as a comparatist and span multiple national literatures and historical periods. In addition, I am drawn to an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that recognizes that important ideas do not often conform to the limitations imposed by traditional disciplinary boundaries.

My most recent work, An Architecture of Empire: Hubert Lyautey and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale, argues that the 1931 Exposition was not only the last in a series of events meant to justify the French imperialism, but part of a more complex social discourse on the nature of the French nation since the Revolution. To this end, I compare the 1931 Exposition with the construction of the French quarter in Rabat, undertaken twenty years earlier. The stakes of both projects were the possibility of making manifest the substance of an idea at home. The problem, I argue, was that the idea to be substantiated had no viable model in the métropole.

My dissertation, Making France Visible: Visual Technologies of Nationalism, examines a series of visual strategies that were instrumental in constructing an image of the French nation and its citizens in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In it, I look at the invention of photography, the formation and restoration of national monuments under the auspices of the preservation of the patrimoine, the foundation of public museums, the circulation of personal and press images made possible by the lithography, and, finally, the use of colonial expositions as propaganda tools of the state for nationalistic ends. My goal in this work is to show that innovations in image production and visual representation provided the means to instantiate the republican rhetoric of the nation in the post-Revolutionary era. I invite you to download a fuller description of my dissertation.