VISUAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

I was trained in sculpture, painting and new media at Dartmouth.  Since graduation, I've shifted my focus from practice to a more theoretical engagement. I'm currently working toward an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the Art Institute of Chicago.  I'm working at the nexus of cultural studies, critical theory, visual culture, and more traditional film-studies and art-historical disciplines. My current project tracks how volcanic landscapes in Pasolini's films relate to larger questions of Marxist and queer critique.  Just to give you a specific example of how I'm working: I'm using Derrida, Benjamin and more recent queer theoretical work from Carla Freccero to work out notions of spectrality in Pasolini's films, which I see intimately connected to interruption of the volcanic.