Research Projects
& Publications
Current (Defense Summer 2025)
Gender and its Archival Negotiations: Photography and the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62)
Dissertation Abstract
This dissertation examines how gender, race, and colonial power were negotiated, constructed, and contested through photographic practices during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Drawing from military, journalistic, and vernacular archives, Gender and its Archival Negotiations investigates the visual economies that shaped public understanding of women’s roles in anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, and everyday life under occupation. Rather than treating photographs as transparent records of history, this study approaches them as active agents of meaning-making—objects embedded within asymmetrical structures of visibility, legibility, and historical erasure.
Foregrounding women as both subjects and authors of photographic narratives, the project critically analyzes images produced by French military photographers, international photojournalists, and lesser-known female photographers who operated within or alongside the Algerian resistance. It also engages with private collections and family archives, emphasizing how personal photographs and material artifacts—such as textiles and jewelry—constitute alternative modes of archiving gendered experience, especially in Amazigh and rural communities often excluded from dominant historiographies. Through close readings of these images and their circulation, the dissertation maps how colonial and anti-colonial visual regimes employed the female body as a site of symbolic contestation, as well as how women negotiated these representations, both strategically and subversively.
By positioning the photographic archive as both a material repository and a contested site of memory and power, this dissertation contributes to critical conversations in photographic theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist historiography. It argues for a rethinking of archival methodology that centers affect, intimacy, and embodied knowledge, and contends that feminist and decolonial approaches to photography can illuminate silenced histories and reframe how we write visual histories of war and resistance.
Publications
Textbooks (co-authored)
2025, Library of Congress (open access text forthcoming by the University of California Press)
World Herstory: A History of the World’s Women
from the Remedial Herstory Project
Book Chapters
2021-22, New Media Art 2022, CICA Press, Gimpo, Korea
Chapter, “Visual Mobility & Containment: Movement between North Africa and Europe expressed by artists Lydia Ourahmane and Ursula Biemann.”
2020, Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid During the COVID-19 Crisis, Pluto Press, London
Edited by Marina Sitrin & Colectiva Sembrar
Chapter Excerpt, "Turtle Island," "Free them all! Prisoner Solidarity and Abolition in the Pandemic."
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
2024, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, CUNY Graduate Center
Issue 25: Labor, Political Economy, and Activism in the Age of Digital Mediation, “Like a Painting: Re-imagining Pedagogy in the Humanities with CUNY Manifold”
Book Reviews
2025, The Journal of North African Studies, Review of Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future
(Forthcoming), Spring 2025
2024, Review of Middle East Studies (RoMES), Cambridge University Press
Nicole Beth Wallenbrock, The Franco-Algerian War Through a Twenty-First Century Lens,
December 2024
Online Publications
2023, The Remedial Herstory Project, Section 28, “1950-1990 Decolonizing Women,” Global History OER textbook.
2020, Public Seminar: Gender and its Discontents, Gender and Sexualities Institute, The New School, Section, “Anarchafeminism and Abolition," Anarchafeminist Manifesto 1.0
Catalogues
2016, Michael Heizer: Altars, distributed by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., in association with Gagosian Gallery