CIMS Director of Undergraduate Studies, Assistant Professor of French
Research and Teaching
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 documentary cinema, disability studies, archive and memory studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, gender studies, and the Anthropocene. Her research has appeared in several edited volumes and journals, including SubStance, Cinema Journal, Memory Studies, and IdeAs – Idées d’Amérique. She has also published essays in Los Angeles Review of Books. Her translations were most recently published in Cinéaste and Traffic: Revue de cinéma. Professor Cazenave’s research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including an ACLS fellowship, a BUCH Junior Faculty Fellowship, a BU Diversity & Inclusion Learn More Research Grant, 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) was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. The book 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, including gendered experiences of the Holocaust.
Professor Cazenave is currently at work on a second book project titled Lessons in Seeing. Demarginalizing Disability in Cinema that recovers representations of disability in non-fiction forms of cinema situated at the margins of film history. The book investigates a transnational visual narrative of disability in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries encompassing Nazi propaganda films, home movies in the French colonies, video collectives in the Vietnam War era, and the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman in the late eighties.
Selected Publications
Cazenave, J. (2019) An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. SUNY Press.