Staff profile

I am a media and cultural theorist with expertise in the transnational history of recorded sound; visual and material culture studies; audiovisual memory and the archive. I completed my PhD at Newcastle University (International Centre for Music Studies/School of Arts and Cultures).

Prior to joining Durham in 2024, I held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge (where I was a French lectrice), the Glasgow School of Art (Forum for Critical Inquiry), the University of Glasgow/Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, Humboldt University of Berlin (Institut für Kulturwissenschaft), Newcastle University (School of Modern Languages/School of Arts and Cultures) and Northumbria University (School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries).

I am interested in embodied knowledge and in what thinking with and through audiovisual objects may mean. I am keen to foster ways of learning through making, unmaking and experimenting (wherever possible!). My teaching and research are informed by a strong commitment to cross-disciplinarity – an approach informed by material culture pedagogy.

My publications include the monographs Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture: Unsettled Matter (Amsterdam University Press 2023/Routledge 2025) and Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove (Routledge 2015), as well as the co-edited collections Phonographic Encounters: Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890-1945 (Routledge 2022, with Eva Moreda Rodríguez) and Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (Bloomsbury 2025, with Nessa Johnston and Jamie Sexton).

I am also a creative writer with short fiction published in literary journals including The Stinging Fly, 3:AM Magazine, The Oxonian Review and elsewhere.

Research Interests

• Music and sound in audiovisual media
• Global history of phonography
• Material culture theory and pedagogy
• Everyday and vernacular cultural practices
• Memory and the senses
• Women’s work in audiovisual media
• Creative writing

Teaching and Module Convening

At MLAC, I teach across French Language & Culture and Visual Culture (Film):

• VISU1021 The Art of the Moving Image
• FREN2061 The Francophone Imaginary: Legacies of Colonialism in Literature and Culture 
• FREN1011 French Language 1A (module co-convenor with Dr Dominique Carlini Versini)
• FREN2051 French Language 2A
• FREN3041 French Language 4
• MELA41830 Specialised Translation (French-English)

Administrative Role

• Incoming Exchange Students Officer (French)

• •Music and sound in audiovisual media
• •Global history of phonography
• •Ecomedia studies
• •Material culture theory and pedagogy
• •Everyday and vernacular cultural practices
• •Memory and the senses
• •Women’s work in audiovisual media
• •Creative writing