Maria Flood

Biography

I completed my MPhil and PhD in French and Francophone Cinema at Cambridge University, where my research examined the representation of historical violence in French and Algerian film. I was subsequently selected as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University where I worked as part of an international research group in the Society for the Humanities. I have held teaching appointments in French and Francophone film in Cornell, Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon.

Research and scholarship

My broad research interests centre on the representation of political violence in non-Western cinema and by Western minority filmmakers, with a particular focus on the gendered dimensions of both violence and resistance. I adopt a cross-disciplinary methodology that weaves together historical and empirical data, film theory, reception, aesthetic and political philosophy, and theories of affect.

My first monograph, Screening Histories of Violence: France, Algeria, and the Moving Image (1962–2010), is the first book to offer a comparative examination of French and Algerian film. This work recognises the ongoing transnational connections between French and Algerian history and focuses on key historical events: the 17 October 1961 massacre, torture and the treatment of women during the Algerian War, and terrorism in Algeria in the 1990s.

My current research project, funded by a British Academy Small Grant, entitled ‘Radical Screens: The Making of the Terrorist’, considers the work of contemporary filmmakers who depict the Islamist radicalisation of young people. The films in my corpus, both documentary and fiction, are drawn from a variety of predominantly non-Western regions and languages, including Algeria, Britain, France, Israel, Mali, Morocco, Palestine, Pakistan, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Tunisia, offering a picture of radicalisation from multiple cultural perspectives. One of the key aims of this project is to examine the intersection of gender and radicalization, and to understand the emotional and environmental factors that drive young people towards radical ideologies, moving away from structural, socio-political, religious, or psychological accounts of causation.

Teaching

Gender and the Cinematic Gaze
Film Texts and Contexts: Contemporary Global Cinema
Introduction to European Cinema
Race and Sexuality on Screen
World Cinemas in the 21st Century

Further information

I am particularly interested in supervising students on the following topics:

Gender, Race and Sexuality
Cinema and Politics
Film Violence
European Cinema
Transnational Cinema
Violence , Ethics and Spectatorship
Photography & Documentary Cinema

Publications

Monographs

Flood, Maria. France, Algeria, and the Moving Image: Screening Histories of Violence (1962–2010), (Oxford: Legenda, 2017). 65,000 words.

Flood, Maria. Moonlight: Screening Black Queer Youth. Cinema and Youth Cultures Series, (London: Routledge, 2021).

Peer reviewed articles

Flood, Maria. ‘Torture in Word and Image: Inhuman Acts in Resnais and Pontecorvo’, Cinema Journal, 58.3 (2019) 12,000 words.

Flood, Maria. ‘“The Very Worst Things”: Vulnerability and Violence in Djamila Sahraoui’s Yema (2012)’, Studies in French Cinema, 18:2 (2019), 246-264. 10,000 words.

Flood, Maria. ‘(Un)Familiar Fictions: Documentary Aesthetics and the 17^th October 1961 Massacre in Jacques Panijel’s Octobre à Paris (1962)’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 54.2 (2018), 157-175. 10,000 words.

Flood, Maria. ‘Women Resisting Terror: Imaginaries of Violence in Algeria (1966–2002)’, Journal of North African Studies, 22:1 (2017), 109-131. 10,000 words.

Flood, Maria. ‘Brutal Visibility: Framing Majid’s Suicide in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005)’, Nottingham French Studies, 56.1, 82-97. 8,000 words.

Flood, Maria. ‘Politics and the Police: Documenting the 17^th October 1961 Massacre’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Special Issue: ‘Faire le point’, (2016) 20: 4, 599-606. 3,500 words.

Flood, Maria. ‘Terrorism and Visibility in Algeria’s ‘Black Decade’: Des Hommes et des dieux (2010)’, French Cultural Studies, 27:1 (2016), 62-72. 8,000 words.

Flood, Maria, ‘Common Vulnerability: Considering Community and its Presentation in Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978)’, Modern and Contemporary France, 21:1 (2013), 73-88. 8,000 words.

Book chapters, interviews and edited journal editions

Flood, Maria, and Florence Martin (eds.). ‘Introduction: The terrorist as ennemi intime in French and Francophone Cinema’, Studies in French Cinema, 18:2 (2019), 171-178. 4,000 words.

Flood, Maria. ‘Critics and controversy: the reception of Salafistes (2016) in France, followed by an interview with co-director François Margolin’, Studies in French Cinema, 18:2 (2019), 233-245. 6,000 words.

Flood, Maria. ‘”A Child of the Ruins”: Youthful Disaffection and the “Making Of” the Terrorist’, in Romain Chareyron and Gilles Viennot (eds.), The Representation of Youth in Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), . 7,000 words.

Flood, Maria. (forthcoming, 2021). ‘Moonlight’, in Gary Needham (ed.), Screening American Cinema (London: Routledge). 4,000 words [teaching volume].

Flood, Maria, (forthcoming, 2020). ‘The Casbah as Colonial Chimera: Images of the Settler from Pépé le Moko to La Haine’, in Janne Lahti (ed.), Settler Colonialism at the Movies (London: Routledge). 7,000 words.

Academic reviews

Flood, Maria. (forthcoming, 2021). Review of ‘Paul Silverstein’s Postcolonial France: Race, Islam, and the Future of the Republic’, Modern and Contemporary France.

Flood, Maria. (forthcoming, 2020). Review of ‘Laila Amine’s Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light’, Cultural Politics.

Flood, Maria. Review of ‘L. Kealhofer-Kemp, Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France (Liverpool University Press: 2015)’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, November 2016. 550 words.

Flood, Maria, Review of ‘Catherine Wheatley BFI Film Classics: Caché’, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 3.2 (2012), 22-23. 550 words.

Bibliography

Flood, Maria. ‘Oxford Bibliographies: Alain Resnais’. Online Reference Bibliography commissioned by Oxford University Press, March 2017.

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Dr Maria Flood