Lauren researches 20th and 21st century literature and film, adaptation, documentary, feminism, and existentialism. Her research on Simone de Beauvoir, Agnès Varda, and documentary film has been published in academic journals including Screen, Film Quarterly, and Adaptation. She recently co-edited a special double issue of Yale French Studies devoted to existentialism, publishing an article on Richard Wright within the same volume. Her article on William Faulkner and the French New Wave received the A. Owen Aldridge Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. She has contributed to the Oxford University Press blog here.
Her research and writing have been supported with fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia's Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture, the Manuscript and Rare Book Library at Emory University, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
She received a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a member of the Royster Society of Fellows.
A selection of her academic writing can be found here or below.
In 1948, Yale French Studies devoted its inaugural issue to existentialism. This anniversary issue responds seventy years later.
“Cinema in the eyes of Simone de Beauvoir,” Screen, Volume 59, Issue 3, 1 September 2018, Pages 381–390.
For most of her life Simone de Beauvoir was a disciplined cinephile. At the height of her cinemagoing she watched three films a day, though by the time she had reached her mid sixties she could no longer be bothered to ‘take the trouble, to stand in a queue, and to undergo the news and the advertisements’.1 But throughout her life she approached the labour of image consumption with rigour, a practice that helped to fashion her as an intellectual and refine her philosophical concepts of gender and alterity.
“Polarities and Pyrotechnics”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 71 No. 1, Fall 2017, Pages 87-90.
A two-hour drive from the Kansas City airport along I-70, a flat, largely unspectacular stretch of highway speckled with smut shops and churches, the sacred nestled alongside the profane, lies Columbia, Missouri. There may be no better place to contemplate the polarity of America than along this road to the True/False documentary film festival in Columbia, itself a blue island in a sea of red.
The True/False Film Fest feels acutely relevant at the dawn of the Trump era, its very title flagging the boundary between truth and deceit. The festival, now in its fourteenth year, unreels alongside the University of Missouri campus, where recent Concerned Student 1950 protests led to the resignation of the UM system president, Tim Wolfe. Head down I-70 for another two hours and you’d be in Ferguson. As the rapper Tef Poe proclaims in Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’s explosive new film, Whose Streets: “Missouri is the new Mississippi.”
“Wild Palms in a New Wave,” Adaptation, Volume 10, Issue 1, 1 March 2017, Pages 34–50.
This article explores an overlooked aspect of Agnès Varda’s pioneering La Pointe Courte (1954)—its function as a literary adaptation. La Pointe Courte was significant to the French New Wave not only in its use of American literary modernist narrative strategies but in its execution of a new model of adaptive poetics that brazenly flouted expectations of fidelity to a literary source. La Pointe Courte’s adaptation of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner—a central literary reference for French film critics after the Second World War—supplied an important, but often uncredited, blueprint for directors like Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, whose films modelled on literary modernist prose and abstracted, deliberately unfaithful filmic adaptations would be more readily recognized by critics for their originality. Varda’s analogical literary adaptation anticipated shifts in cinematic style that would echo throughout later works by directors affiliated with the Nouvelle Vague, including Godard and Resnais. This article seeks to revise how we understand the Nouvelle Vague’s origins, which, as Geneviève Sellier has argued, has all too often been told from the perspective of the masculine singular.
"What Is a Digital Author?: The Faulknerian Author Function in Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme." Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 51 no. 4, 2014, pp. 533-556.
This article examines Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) through its references to the fiction of William Faulkner. This article contends that Film Socialisme’s distinctive method of allusion serves a poetic function, beckoning our attention to how language, representations, and ideas recirculate, and what this means to us—or should mean to us—in a world pervaded by digital technology and intellectual property regimes. Godard’s references to the fiction of William Faulkner serve as a case study, not only because they offer a rich illustration of how Godard reworks his source material, but also because the filmmaker has consistently gestured to the work of Faulkner throughout his career, from his first feature-length film to his most recent. This article finds that the film’s circuitous and prolific method of allusion functions both as a means to critique commonly held notions of authorship, and to point out the absurdity of copyright laws, or as they are known in France, droits d’auteur. Further, Film Socialisme’s use of Light in August in points to an epistemic anxiety regarding the limits of language and narrative to faithfully represent lived experience, and in turn, the world.