Ramona Fotiade

Biography

Ramona Fotiade is currently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages & Cultures

Research Interest

Modern and Contemporary French Thought (Existentialism, Deconstruction, Postmodernism), Twentieth-Century French Avant-Garde Movements (Dada and Surrealism), French Photography and Cinema. Dr Fotiade's research profile spans across three inter-related areas of investigation in French Twentieth-Century Studies: avant-garde literary movements, philosophy and visual culture. In 2016 she curated the exhibition, Léon Chestov - La Pensée du dehors (at the Mairie du 6e in Paris), devoted to the sesquincentenary of the existential thinker, and co-produced and scripted a short documentary film released during the exhibition. She has also prefaced and annotated the new, critical edition of Lev Shestov's work, Athens and Jerusalem, in English, published with Ohio University Press. Her recent publications in visual culture include an essay on Bazin, Surrealism and Postmodernism published in The Major Realist Film Theorists critical anthology edited by Ian Aitken (EUP, 2016), and a monograph on Jean-Luc Godard’s cult feature, A bout de souffle, which was commissioned by the I.B. Tauris Publishers, and was very favourably reviewed in the TLS (17 January 2014). She also published a book-chapter on 'Bunuel's Surrealist Time-Image' in Rob Stone & Julian Gutiérrez-Albilla's Companion to Luis Bunuel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). In 2010 she was invited to contribute as one of only four international advisors to the major Surrealist retrospective organised at the Barbican Arts Centre in London (June-September 2010). On this occasion, she wrote five short essays on French cinema and Surrealist architecture for the exhibition catalogue (The Surreal House, Yale University Press, 2010). The exhibition attracted more than 42,500 visitors and was very favourably reviewed in The Independent, The Guardian and voted nr 1 critics’ choice in Time Out. Over the past three years, she has also published several book-chapters and articles on French cinema, in preparation for the first integrated study of Surrealist photography and film from a philosophical perspective, due to be published next year: Pictures of the Mind. Surrealist Photography and Film (Peter Lang, 2017). The argument of the book focuses on the relevance of post-structuralist theories (in particular, deconstruction) for the re-assessment of the Surrealist approach to still and moving images leading to the elaboration of an ‘aesthetics of spectrality’ with lasting implications for a range of post-war trends in art-house and popular cinema. An edited volume on the topic of Embodiment (Phenomenological, Religious and Deconstructive Views on Living and Dying), which includes contributions from Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Henry was published in March 2014 with Ashgate. In 2010 Dr Fotiade was asked to give a paper in the prestigious “Provocations” series of debates organised by the Forum for European Philosophy at Regent’s Park College, Oxford (Life After Deconstruction, 3 June 2010). In recognition of the international reputation of the Shestov Studies Society and the scholarly publication (Les Cahiers Léon Chestov) which she directs, the Paris-based publisher Le Bruit du Temps entrusted her with the direction of the new critical edition of Lev Shestov’s complete works. The first five volumes in the series, four of which she prefaced, annotated and commented, came out in September 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2015 respectively, and were very favourably reviewed in the press. The prestigious French radio station, France Culture, invited her on two occasions to give 34-minute interviews (with Alain Venstein) on this editorial project. The interviews were broadcast in November 2010 and October 2012. More recently, she was asked to contribute to a programme on Benjamin Fondane’s avant-garde film, Tararira (broadcast on France Culture on 16 January 2014).