Assistant Professor of French Director of Undergraduate Studies, CIMS
Professor Cazenave teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first century French cinema, literature, and theory. She is also affiliated with the program in Cinema and Media Studies, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, and the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.
Her research interests include transnational cinema, nonfiction film, disability studies, archive and memory studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, gender studies, and the Anthropocene. Her research has appeared in Cinema Journal, Memory Studies, and IdeAs – Idées d’Amérique, and several edited volumes. She has also published essays in Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition, her research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including an ACLS fellowship and a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Her first book, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (SUNY Press, 2019), undertakes a comprehensive examination of the 220 hours of filmic material Claude Lanzmann excluded from his 1985 Holocaust opus. In retrieving alternative eyewitness accounts captured by the camera but ultimately left on the cutting room floor, this book offers a voice to testimonies from the margins. It also addresses crucial questions raised by Lanzmann’s film, including the absence of a gendered experience of the Holocaust. An Archive of the Catastrophe was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Professor Cazenave is currently at work on a second book titled Lessons in Seeing: Disability in the Media Archive (under advanced contract with Columbia University Press). The book draws on neglected archives to investigate how film and media not only constructed disability in the twentieth century but also worked against this social construction through acts of visual activism. Lessons in Seeing centers on four cases studies: (1) Nazi propaganda films; (2) home movies and snapshots in postwar France; (3) the “street tapes” of the early video revolution; and (4) Frederick Wiseman’s four-part documentary series on the Alabama Institute for Blind and Deaf.
Selected Publications
Cazenave, J. (2019) An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. SUNY Press.