Director of Graduate Studies,
Professor of French
Research and Teaching
Professor Cazenave teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first century French cinema, literature, and theory. She is also affiliated with the program in Cinema and Media Studies, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, and the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. She is the recipient of the 2025 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Education.
Her research interests include documentary cinema, disability studies, archive and memory studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, gender studies, and the Anthropocene. Her research has appeared in several edited volumes and journals, including The Cambridge History of the Holocaust, SubStance, and Cinema Journal. She has also published essays in Los Angeles Review of Books and Nexus. Her translations were most recently published in Cinéaste and Traffic: Revue de cinéma. Professor Cazenave’s research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including a Visiting Residential Fellow at UConn Humanities Institute, a ACLS fellowship, a BUCH Junior Faculty Fellowship, a BU Diversity & Inclusion Learn More Research Grant, and a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Her first book, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (SUNY Press, 2019), was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. The book undertakes a comprehensive examination of the 220 hours of filmic material Claude Lanzmann excluded from his 1985 Holocaust opus. In retrieving alternative eyewitness accounts captured by the camera but ultimately left on the cutting room floor, this book offers a voice to testimonies from the margins, including gendered experiences of the Holocaust. A French translation of An Archive of the Catastrophe is forthcoming from CNRS Éditions in 2027.
Professor Cazenave is currently completing a second book titled Overlooked: Visualizing Disability Across the Eugenic Atlantic (under contract with Columbia University Press). The book draws on neglected archives to investigate how film and media not only constructed disability in the twentieth century but also worked against this social construction through acts of visual activism. Overlooked centers on four cases studies: (1) Nazi propaganda films; (2) home movies and snapshots in postwar France; (3) the “street tapes” of the early video revolution; and (4) Frederick Wiseman’s four-part documentary series on the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind.
Selected Publications
Cazenave, O. (2011) Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment. University of Virginia Press.
Cazenave, O. (2007) Afrique Sur Seine. Lexington Books.
Cazenave, O. (1996) Femmes rebelles Naissance d’un nouveau roman africain au féminin. Editions L’Harmattan.