Noa Saunders

Noa Saunders

Noa Saunders

Research/Areas of Interest

20th-21st century poetry, performance studies, film and media studies, material culture, critical theory, philosophy, affect

Education

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Boston University, 2024
  • Master of Fine Arts, University of Maryland, United States, 2016
  • Bachelor of Arts, Ohio State University, 2013

Biography

My scholarship explores the manifestations of everyday uncertainties in 20th century poetry and film. Reveling in the trivial, the quotidian, and the precarious, the artists I study demonstrate the ways in which we receive meanings through words and bodies that we don't know what to do with. My book project "Vulnerable Forms" illustrates how the uncertainty of twentieth-century life disrupts artistic production for poets and filmmakers in a way that not only has tangible impacts on form, but also electrifies our attention to cultural and political circumstance. Drawing on performance and affect studies, language philosophy, and media aesthetics, my project asserts that these artists' formal attention to and within states of confusion, clumsiness, and crisis underscores their adversity, constituting a disregarded political aspect of artistic production. I'm particularly interested in poets and filmmakers like Gertrude Stein, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Charlie Chaplin, Maya Deren, Chantal Akerman, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, and Diane di Prima.

Courses taught:

ENG0001 Expository Writing
ENG0002 Digital Media Cultures