VANESSA MARIE BRUTSCHE portrait
  • Assistant Professor, World Languages and Cultures
801-581-4395

Research Statement

As a literature and film scholar, I specialize in modern and contemporary France, with an emphasis on 1945 to the present. My current research focuses on the intersections between critical theories of space and the memorial legacies of historical violence. The book project I am working on explores how the language of what was called the “concentrationary universe” appears in texts and films to describe the conditions of modern life, at a moment when France’s urban landscape was undergoing massive changes. Overall, my work is dedicated to understanding the ways in which writers and filmmakers refused to allow the camps to be remembered solely as a thing of the past, closed off in space and time, and instead insisted on the political and ethical urgency of continuing to grapple with the phenomenon of the camps.

Research Keywords

  • 20th-21st century French and Francophone literature and cinema
  • Film and Media
  • Memory studies
  • Holocaust studies
  • Architecture and Urbanism
  • Critical Geography and the Spatial Humanities

Presentations

  • “Memory Cultures in Post-Holocaust France.” Poetics of Memory Symposium, University of Utah. Presentation, Presented, 09/11/2023.
  • “Histoire d’un désert: Space, Violence and Survival in Jean Cayrol’s Ecological Writing.” 20th and 21st-Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium. University of Arizona. Conference Paper, Presented, 04/14/2023.
  • "Jean Cayrol: from the Camp to the City." Tanner Humanities Center, Work in Progress Talk. Presentation, Other, 04/06/2023.
  • “Mourning, Melancholy, and Virtual Histories in Resnais’s Stavisky (1974).” Society for French Studies Annual Conference. Queen’s University Belfast. Conference Paper, Presented, 06/28/2022.
  • “Viral Camus: Assessing the Resurgence of The Plague (1947) in the Covid Era.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention. Conference Paper, Presented, 01/08/2022.
  • “The bidonville as lieu de mémoire: from Site to Symbol in Postwar France.” Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in the Modern Francosphere. Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (online), 7-8 October. Conference Paper, Presented, 10/08/2021.
  • “Concentrationary Aesthetics in Postwar France: Camp, City, Colony.” ACLA Annual Meeting. Virtual Conference, 8-11 April. Conference Paper, Presented, 04/10/2021.
  • “Allegory and Emergency in Camus’s L’Etat de siège.” 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium. Oklahoma City, March 14-16. Conference Paper, Presented, 03/2019.
  • “Voices of the Penal Colony: Leïlla Sebbar’s ‘Louisa.’” ACLA Annual Meeting. Universiteit Utrecht (Netherlands), 6-9 July. Conference Paper, Presented, 07/2017.
  • “Les travellings sont affaire de mémoire: Memory as Movement in Duras’s Aurélia Steiner.” 20th and 21st Century French and Franchophone Studies International Colloquium. St. Louis, March 17-19. Recipient of the Prix « Recherche au présent » (Classée seconde) . Conference Paper, Presented, 03/2016.
  • “Voyage au bout de la nuit: A Politics of Memory (in) Space.” MLA Annual Convention. Vancouver, January 8-11. Conference Paper, Presented, 01/2015.

Publications

  • Vanessa Brutsche (2023). “Viral Camus: Mapping Cultural Memory in the Covid Era". Memory Studies. Vol. 17:4. Published, 05/25/2023.
  • Vanessa Brutsche (2023). “Retro Visions: Scandalous Politics in Resnais’s Stavisky (1974) and Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978)” . French Historical Studies. Vol. 46:2, 277-312. Published, 05/01/2023.
  • Vanessa Brutsche (2020). “Duras’s Aurélia Steiner and the Ethics of Cinematic Form” . French Studies. Vol. 74:3, 403-419. Published, 07/2020.