Professional Background
Brittany Bernard received a PhD in French language and literature in 2024 from Boston University. Her dissertation, “Revenants: Gendered Memories of Trauma in the Works of Leïla Sebbar, Diane Kurys, Alice Zeniter, and Mati Diop,” examined how women writers and filmmakers return to unresolved histories of the Holocaust, colonialism, and migration through formally hybrid works that blur autobiography, documentary, and fiction. Her research focuses on women’s testimony, transgenerational trauma, and archival absence in contemporary French and Francophone cinema and literature. She has presented her research at international colloquia, including at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 and the University of Chicago Center in Paris, and has served as a visiting researcher and part-time lecturer in Boston University’s Department of Romance Studies.
Fellowship Research
As a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellow, Dr. Bernard will examine the place of women’s testimony within the cinematic and archival history of the Holocaust through the absence of Marceline Loridan-Ivens from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on Convoy 71 alongside Simone Veil, who would later become one of France’s most influential political figures, Loridan-Ivens was a prominent survivor-witness, writer, and filmmaker. Her testimony in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (1961) is among the earliest filmed testimonies by a Holocaust survivor in France. Yet she is absent from the 185 hours of interview outtakes filmed for Shoah and preserved by the Museum. Dr. Bernard will work with the Museum’s Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, reading its outtakes alongside the Chronique d’un été sound rushes held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Together, these archives illuminate the production contexts through which women survivors’ voices entered—or remained outside—the cinematic record of Holocaust memory. This research will form the basis of the first chapter of Revenantes, her book project on women’s testimony and the afterlives of twentieth-century trauma.
Residency Period: November 1, 2026 - April 30, 2027