Research

My first book, Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City (MIT Press, June 2021), builds on work by the French philosopher Michel Serres. He draws attention to the four meanings of “parasite” in French: an uninvited guest, a harmful organism, a mooch, and interference in communication. He argues that these four meanings are intertwined. I apply this idea to urbanism, asking who and what constitute the parasites of Paris. The city has been shaped by what I call anti-parasitic urbanism: the prioritization of cleanliness, order, efficiency and clarity. Through close readings of texts and practices that challenge the anti-parasitism of the city (including graffiti and street art, parkour and urbex, protests and riots), I argue for a radically different approach to urbanism and urban life.

My second book project, tentatively titled Sans Public, takes the curious situation of France’s second Covid-19 lockdown, when actors were allowed into rehearsal rooms but spectators weren’t allowed into theatres, as a starting point to interrogate the relationship between rehearsal and spectacle in contemporary French theatre more broadly. It looks at a variety of cases where the show is not the (primary) goal of the rehearsal process, or where the rehearsal process becomes an aesthetic object. These include certain approaches to écriture de plateau, theatre as practice-based research, mediations of rehearsal processes, and non-representational practices like drama therapy. 

Publications

Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City, MIT Press, 2021.

‘Parkour Fails and Hébertisme: Laughing at the New Man,’ Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES 27.1 2023.

'La Divina Commedia in Italian Street Art,' Dante Alive, edited by Simone Marchesi and Francesco Ciabattoni, Routledge, 2022.

'Between Memory and Mobilization: The Graffiti and Street Art of the Paris Commune,' 'La Commune n’est pas morte…' Special issue of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 49.3-4, 2021.

'Le Groupe fait de/du bruit : communication et communauté dans Mort de quelqu’un de Jules Romains,' Modern Language Notes, 134.4, 2019.

'What Dies in the Street: Camus’s La Peste and Infected Networks,' French Forum, 41.3, 2016.