about
I research and write about the humanitarian preoccupations of contemporary documentary culture, as they intersect with questions of voice, listening, accent, carcerality, and disability. I am Professor of English in 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, the Visualizing Abolition initiative at University of California, Santa Cruz, and the ConTrust Research Center at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt.
CURRENT PROJECTS
I am working on a book with filmmaker and scholar Brett Story (Union, The Hottest August, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes) titled Why Look at Prisons (forthcoming from Duke University Press). The book 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. We chart the production of “carceral common sense” within the field of documentary image-making, while advancing an alternative, abolitionist vision for non-fiction cinema. Publications and projects related to this book include “Four Propositions on True Crime and Abolition” and “No Justice, No Relief” and 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.
This Spring, I am a visiting scholar at Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at University of California, Santa Cruz that works to shift social attachments to prisons through art and education, in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated people. I am working with colleagues at Visualizing Abolition to produce Unmaking the Prison Image, a podcast mini-series exploring the role documentary can play in imagining a world without prisons, and Carceral Media Ecologies—and How to Break Them, a symposium on disrupting the carceral state and its media ecologies across multiple scales of intervention: from feminist organizing and prisoner-initiated programs to incarcerated media production, participatory defense, counterforensic art, and legal advocacy
BOOKS
I am the author of The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability and Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. and co-editor of the anthology Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice.
The Documentary Audit (Columbia University Press, 2025) examines the politics of listening and the limits of accountability in documentary, demonstrating how justice-driven practices of listening have been used to profile, exclude, and incarcerate, while also charting the transformative possibilities of listening otherwise. Thinking through the many meanings of the word “audit” (an unspoken listening vantage, a practice of responsible accounting; a ritual of verification; an informal mode of pedagogy), I ask how the question of listening is central to documentary. The book’s chapters (“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.
Thinking with an Accent (winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2024 René Wellek Prize, available in print and Open Access from UC Press) reframes accent as something that conditions not just speaking but also looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. 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.
My first book, Immediations (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.
BOOK SERIES
I co-edit two book series: Investigating Visible Evidence at Columbia University Press, and the diamond open access series Accented at Amherst College Press. I also serve on the advisory board for the documentary journal World Records, and was Board President of The Flaherty from 2018-2020.
For a full list of my publications with linked PDFs, please see Writing.