Current Research
The Freud Museum
In January 2025, I will be presenting a virtual lecture with The Freud Museum on Princess Marie Bonaparte and the Politics of Sex.
In the summer of 2022, I was a Writer in Residence at the Freud Museum in London where I explored Princess Marie Bonaparte’s extensive correspondence with various members of the Freud family. My interest in Freud and psychoanalysis was inspired by an earlier visit to the Museum, where I marveled, like most visitors, at the couch, the books, the art, and the photographs. I became curious to discover how Freud had escaped the fate of most Jews during the war not only with his life and his immediate family, but also with what appeared to be every precious item in his collection. How had his life and legacy remained so intact? The answer to this question lay in the little-known story of Bonaparte: a royal, and a close friend and colleague of Freud.
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To the right: Selfie of me at the Freud museum, London in summer 2022.
Marie Bonaparte
In sexuality studies, Bonaparte is often sensationalized as a courageous (but misguided) scientific innovator who submitted to experimental surgeries to alter the placement of her clitoris to improve her experience of sexual pleasure. Fascinated by her devotion to pleasure, I sensed there was far more to the story. During my time at the Freud Museum, I studied Bonaparte’s long history with Freud and his family, and found traces of her everywhere in the museum among Freud’s possessions. My work in the archives has just begun, and as I embark on the translations of her letters, I hope to bring fresh attention to Bonaparte’s life, legacy, and place in the intellectual history of psychoanalysis.
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To the right: Bonaparte and Freud in his Vienna office, 19 Bergasse .
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Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century
This edited anthology will be available February 6th 2025 from Bloomsbury Press. Historically, documentary filmmaking has always welcomed women with greater enthusiasm than narrative film industries, and the momentum created by decades of women documentary filmmakers continues to accelerate in the 21st century. As is so often the case, however, the lion’s share of this attention remains trained on women filmmakers from Europe and North America. This edited book offers an intervention in both global film and documentary studies by highlighting women’s documentary practices as well as alternative and emergent networks of production and reception in the
Global South.
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To the right: still from Zeynep Akcay's short documentary Kam (2020).
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"Sexuality and Discourses of Care in Feminist Documentary"
This essay explores forms of feminist screen media that produce political desires about sexual liberation. I focus on key works that visualize women’s pleasure in conversation with the language of documentary, that is, on projects committed to matters of truth, agency, education, autonomy, and self-care—terms that began to shape sexual politics in the context of 1970s feminism. I conclude with rare examples of feminist media projects that explore the connective tissue between the orgasmically radical as well as the social and material conditions of women’s lives.
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To the right: still from Carolee Schneemann's experimental short film Fuses (1967).
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