Current research
Both a nineteenth and a twentieth century scholar, my main interest is at the point of contact between texts and images, or in other words I enjoy a kind of visual studies where literature still plays a strong part. Since I begun considering myself a scholar, my papers have often dealt with issues such as mirrors and windows in genres as numerous as novels, poems and films. It is very likely that all my work on Surrealism has begun the day I read this famous sentence about a man, cut in half, seen at his window.
There is logic, I would argue, in the fact that my dissertation is concentrating on late nineteenth century literature, art and culture: never before had Paris been such a center of visual awareness. Strolling while being seen (or hiding himself) in the middle of the crowd, the famous Flâneur embodies this passion for seeing which is then to be found in impressionist paintings – but also within new architectural devices such as the Eiffel Tower. A passion from which, inevitably, cinema was born.
From Surrealism to Impressionism, via Film Studies, I have so far mostly focused on the modern and post-modern interactions between what is written to be read and what is created to be seen. And in the years to come, I intend to follow an even more interdisciplinary scholarly approach connecting these scattered interests I have for the relationship between images and texts, by dealing with the Avant-Gardes in a broader way.
