Elisabeth Hodges

Introduction

Elisabeth Hodges is a specialist of French Cinema and Visual Culture, Contemporary Film, Early Modern French Literature, and Critical Theory. She is the author of Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance (Ashgate, 2008) and numerous articles on Renaissance literature. Her current research focuses on contemporary art cinema and she has published articles on The Wire, Godard’s JLG/JLG, and Mati Diop’s Atlantics. She is currently completing a book manuscript, Drift. On Cinema and Inattention, that explores the poetics of drift in works by transnational filmmakers and artists, such as Abbas Kiarostami, Isaac Julien and Helena Wittman, Claire Denis, and Mati Diop. She teaches during winter term in a Miami faculty-led study abroad program in Paris, Paris Cultural Capital.

Research Interests

• Transnational Cinema
• Visual Culture
• French Literature and Culture
• Critical Theory
• Contemporary Moving Image Art

Courses Taught

• French 131, Masterpieces of French Literature in Translation
• French 201, Intermediate French
• French 301, Culture & Interpretation
• French 366, French Cinema
• French 440/540, Gender, Sexuality, & Creativity
• French 600, Cinema and Time

Education

• Ph.D. Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University (2002)
• A.M. Romance Languages & Literatures, Harvard University (1998)
• M.A. French, University of California, Los Angeles (1996)
• B.A. French, University of Washington (1992)

Publications

Books

• Drift. On Cinema and Inattention (book manuscript in progress)
  
  Drift analyses the characteristics and consequences of undirected or aimless movement in contemporary cinema. Although film is an artistic medium originally designed to capture our attention, what this book proposes is to investigate how drift has emerged as an aesthetic, a condition of contemporary media, and a theme in contemporary film. Each chapter of the book analyzes different characteristic of drift; –visual, temporal, corporeal and sonic– in films by Abbas Kiarostami, Isaac Julien, Helena Wittman, Mati Diop, and Claire Denis. 

• Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2008)
  
  

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Alice Diop’s Still Lives” (article in progress)
• “Oceanic Feeling in Mati Diop’s Atlantique” French Screen Studies, forthcoming, 2024.
• “Les moustaches de Montaigne, ou la molle vérité des sens” in David LaGuardia and Todd Reeser, eds., Mélanges en honneur de Lawrence Kritzman, Littératures de théorie et la Renaissance française, Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2021: 141-153.
  
• “La vertu de mémoire” La vertu de la littérature à la Renaissance. Pascal Chiron and Lidia Radi, eds. Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2016: 133-145.
  
• “Montaigne and the Will Not to Forget” Memory and Community in Renaissance France, David LaGuardia and Cathy Yandell, eds., Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2015: 161-170.
  
• “Retrospective Godard” A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard. Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline, eds. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2014: 430-440.
  
• “Aneau excentrique” Illustrations insconscientes: écritures de la Renaissance. Mélanges en l’honneur de Tom Conley. Bernd Renner and Phillip Usher, eds .Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014: 77-92.
  
• “Espace mémoire évènement” (The Wire) Revue Labyrinthe 37 “Les séries et la vie” no. 2 (September 2011): 53-60.
  
• “Rabelais and Feminism” Approaches to Teaching Rabelais’ Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Other Works. Todd Reeser and Floyd Gray, eds. NY: MLA Publications, 2011: 384-401.