about
I research and write about the humanitarian preoccupations of contemporary documentary culture, as they intersect with and open onto questions of voice, listening, accent, carcerality, and disability. I am an Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film & Media Studies at Amherst College. My research has been awarded the René Wellek Prize and the Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, and has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Copeland Fellowship at Amherst College and the ConTrust Research Center at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt.
My forthcoming book The Documentary Audit (from Columbia University Press) explores how listening has come to be equated, in documentary discourse and practice, with accountability. Thinking through the many meanings of the word “audit” (an unspoken listening vantage, a mode of administrative oversight, a ritual of verification, an informal mode of attendance), I ask how documentaries audit the world, and the values they endorse when they hold themselves and others to account. The three chapters of the book (“Listening with an Accent”; “Listening in Crip Time”; “Listening like an Abolitionist”) unpack the implicit values and comportments embedded in three exceedingly common documentary listening habits that create the reality they purport to verify — neutral listening, entitled listening, and juridical listening — in pursuit of unlikely origins, forgotten chapters, and oppositional itineraries. The Documentary Audit was written with the support of a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which funded my residency as a visiting scholar at NYU’s Center for Media, Culture, and History and the NYU Center for Disability Studies in AY 2020-2021.
I recently co-edited the anthology Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2024 René Wellek Prize, available in print and Open Access from UC Press). Thinking with an Accent casts accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception shaping our global cultural economy. Theorizing accent as a mediatized object, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice, the volume invites readers to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical, multisensory inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care. The book includes contributions from myself and co-editors Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar, and many other scholars and practitioners of media, literature, law, linguistics, politics, and music.
I am currently working on a new book, Captive Cinema: Prisons, Documentary, and the Carceral Common Sense, in collaboration with Brett Story, co-director of Union (premiering at Sundance in January 2024), and director of the award-winning documentary films The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and The Hottest August. Captive Cinema examines the prison not only as topical attraction for documentary, but as the insidious logic underwriting the narrative codes and values that govern so much of documentary meaning and circulation. Through close readings of films and videos, extensive review of research and literature, and conversations with practitioners, the book charts the production of “carceral common sense” within the field of documentary image-making, whilst advancing, as an alternative, an abolitionist vision for future non-fiction cinema. You can read an essay Brett and I coauthored, “Four Propositions on True Crime and Abolition” HERE (click HERE for an accessible pdf). We also programmed the film series Watch the Cops! Policing New York in the Movies which screened at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) from Nov 4-7, 2022.
I serve on the advisory boards of a number of documentary publications and organizations, including World Records journal and the Investigating Visible Evidence book series at Columbia University Press. I was also Board President of The Flaherty from 2018-2020.
My first book, Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke UP, 2017) won the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2019 Harry Levin Prize for an outstanding first book, and was a finalist for the 2018 Association for the Arts of the Present Book Prize. Immediations examines the humanitarian ethic of “giving voice to the voiceless” in participatory documentary interventions that equip disenfranchised subjects with cameras and other media. You can read the introduction HERE. Immediations is based on my doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the Marie J. Langlois Outstanding Dissertation Prize in 2012 at Brown University, and was written with the support of a Copeland Postdoctoral Fellowship at Amherst College.
For a full list of my publications with linked PDFs, please see Writing.