Humanities & Arts

The Debuisson Collection has brought me closer to the history of Paris than I have ever been. Over the past quarter I have cataloged the stereoviews, chromolithographs, as well as a section of Roland Liot’s photographs. Each category has given me distinct impressions of Paris. The stereoviews, organized by the landmarks of Paris, have better acquainted me to the various architectural styles and also brought the scenes of Parisian streets and parks to life. What amazed me the most was the collection of chromolithographs.

The musical project Sum and Difference combines acoustic research from the French national Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) for recording and understanding a synthetic physical model of the ancient Chinese instrument, the sheng, with Stanford research in audio spatialization and ethically composing for traditional instruments and electronics.  The title is in reference to the psychoacoustic phenomena of sum and difference tones that are artificially pe

My research is at the crossroad between literature, philosophy and political theory. More precisely, I study the intertwined relations between politics, literature and theory in mid-twentieth century France through the theme of community in Blanchot and Barthes’ thoughts. Both alternated periods of political commitment and ethical disengagement. By doing so, they dismantled and overcame the well known opposition between engagement and l’art pour l’art. I aim to answer to these questions: What kind of community are they writing and dreaming about?

This project will digitally map Le Vaillant’s journey from the account of his journey into the interior of the Cape of Good Hope (1781-83). The Voyage de M. le Vaillant dans l’Interieur de l’Afrique par le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1790) stands out for its detailed ethnography of the amaXhosa and Khoe people; for its natural history; and for its cartography. The text offers unique insights into South Africa’s early colonial period, and the natural history arising from this ‘first safari’ is directly reflected in French museum collections.

My dissertation, “The Drama of our World: Spectator and Subject in Medieval Kashmir and Early Modern Europe,” is a comparative study on characterizations of the subject, the poet and the dramatic spectator in long-tenth century Kashmir and long seventeenth-century France and England.

Daniel Sada is one of the most complex writers in the landscape of Latin American literature. Often compared to Joyce for his linguistic experimentation and rigorous attention to form, he has produced over 15 works of poetry, short stories and novels, leaving behind a plethora of genetic materials, the study of which will allow us to better understand his creative process, in all its specificity, and the dynamics of his poetics.

The objective of this project is to rethink the evolution of 17th and 18th-century letter-writing practices in France through an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary studies, cultural history, and media theory. My research charts the emergence of practices for building a socially-oriented persona through letters, and traces how letter-writers used these practices to present themselves in society to their social networks, from the court society of 17th-century France through the Enlightenment.

“Spectral” music, a contemporary movement initiated in the 70’s, uses the acoustic properties of sound as its main source material. In “spectral” music works, scientific tools and techniques are used alongside sensibility and sound perception.  As it combines a scientific and sensorial exploration of sound, this music raises fundamental questions on the frontier between art and science.

This project seeks to explore the ways in which capitalism as a social process was re-established, reorganized, and operated in the late Ottoman Empire, especially between 1881 and 1914. In doing so, I will look at the Public Debt Administration (PDA), a European creditors-led institution that was tasked with collecting tax revenues of certain imperial monopolies and turned into the most important hub for the imperial capitalist economy through its more than twenty offices extending from Yemen to Salonica.