Research

My research began in comparative literature, exploring questions of memory and trauma in the aftermath of collective historical catastrophe. My dissertation, and the published work that followed it, examined how Aharon Appelfeld and Édouard Glissant — writing out of the post-Holocaust Israeli and postcolonial Caribbean contexts respectively — developed literary idioms that registered what official historical narratives could not accommodate: the disorienting persistence of the past in the present, and the difficulty of constructing collective identity in its shadow.

From that foundation, my work extended into Caribbean literature more broadly — particularly the ways writers like Earl Lovelace, Jamaica Kincaid, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Glissant challenged the generic postmodernism that had emerged in the West, largely without reference to the colonial conditions that postmodernist and poststructuralist thought claimed to diagnose. Postcolonial Caribbean writing, I argued, was not simply applying metropolitan theory to peripheral experience; it was contesting the terms on which that theory had been constructed.

More recently, my research has turned toward Israeli and postcolonial cinema — a medium I have engaged not only as a scholar but as a festival programmer and juror across more than a decade of work in film and media culture. I was drawn especially to the films of Nadav Lapid, whose work interrogates the ways that historical trauma has been institutionalised in Israeli culture — mobilised in the service of national identity rather than genuine reckoning. From Lapid I have moved toward questions of Israeli-Palestinian collaboration in film, and toward works that resist easy genre classification precisely because the realities they address resist it too.

These films — holding incompatible perspectives in tension without resolving them — suggest that aesthetic form is not merely a vehicle for political content but a way of thinking through disagreement itself. My current research pursues that insight: into the relationship between formal experimentation, historical memory, and the conditions under which difficult political questions can remain open rather than foreclosed.

My ORCID profile and full cv are available below.