Scholarship
Image description: A close-up of a painted portrait of George Sand’s face, showing her nose, mouth, and left eye and brow, a red flower is tucked into her dark hair above her covered ear.
Kinship and hospitality in Indiana by George Sand
My essay on George Sand’s novel Indiana (1832) is out in an edited collection from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. It’s edited by Françoise Ghillebaert.
Indiana tells the story of its heroine—a young woman, in a loveless marriage to the old Colonel Delmare, who finds herself seduced by the rakish Raymon de Ramière. Raymon causes more trouble than he's worth: Noun, Indiana's beloved servant, foster sister, and sort-of-twin, is already involved with Raymon; Indiana’s cousin, Ralph, is secretly in love with her; and Delmare tries to make Indiana move with him to Île Bourbon, a far away French colony.
In my essay, I analyze how customs of hospitality and the kinship relations in Delmare’s household ultimately challenge the patriarchal organization of the family and undo the colonel’s power.
Claude Cahun, Self-portrait, ca. 1929. [Image description: A black-and-white portrait of artist Claude Cahun posing against a black studio cloth backdrop. A dramatic mask hangs from the top of the backdrop over Cahun’s right shoulder.]
Performative Collaboration and photography
I am at work on my first book, based on my dissertation, Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner. The project analyzes how artists inscribe performances into hybrid literary / photographic texts that then inspire their audiences to collaborate in the open-ended work by performing some part of it (spurred on by the power of photographs).