top of page
large-screenshot1.jpeg

Jessica is a PhD candidate in Film at the University of Cambridge. 

​

Jessica's thesis conceptualises and identifies the quality of ‘looseness’ as it manifests across a range of narrative films, with theoretical support from literary studies and philosophy. Although ‘looseness’ is recurrently conceptualised throughout the project, by ‘loose’ Jessica is referring to films which are in some sense lingering, attentive, loiterly, or digressive; films which feel adrift from or unconcerned with an especially dense or eventful narrative. The project attends to a range of distinct filmographies, including the films of Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman, Kelly Reichardt, Wim Wenders, and Agnès Varda. 

​

Through building a concept across a range of film examples, Jessica’s thesis aims to offer close readings of individual films and generate a productive framework to uniquely accentuate and correlate other filmic aspects, including gesture, subtlety, screen presence, emotion, reciprocity, coherence, ekphrasis, desire, and their philosophical underpinnings. 

​

This topic emerged at the intersection of various research interests, including film aesthetics, slow cinema, women's filmmaking, film philosophy, narratology, contemporary scholarship in literary digressivity, film interpretation and criticism.

In other research, Jessica has written about fabulation in Jacques Rivette’s Céline et Julie vont en bateau, the emotional contours of style in Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring, and cinemas of ephemerality, specifically in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, and Chantal Akerman’s Saute ma ville
 

Jessica is also a supervisor for undergraduates, a member of BAFTSS and MOVIOLA, and a co-convenor of Close-Up. She has attended various film festivals as a press delegate and has a byline at MUBI Notebook.

​

scholarships/prizes

Vice-Chancellor’s and Newnham College Scholarship

(2023-2026, University of Cambridge, full funding for 3 years of doctoral research)

​

Worcester College Distinction Prize

(2022, University of Oxford, for completing an MSt with grade Distinction). Concurrently, the highest average mark in MSt Film Aesthetics cohort.

​

Humanities Rotary Prize

(2020, University of Kent, for the top-ranked undergraduate student reading BA English and American Literature)

​

​

​​​​

conferences/events

‘Narrative Carousels and Modes of Play in Céline et Julie vont en bateau’, Preface, Prelude, Prologue: an interdisciplinary symposium

University of Sussex, Lewes Depot Cinema, June 2024


‘everything turns into Formica: visualising crisis in Barbara Loden’s Wanda’, Newnham College MCR Graduate Conference

Newnham College, University of Cambridge, June 2024


‘Napoleon’ (introducing the film for a triptych screening)

English Faculty, University of Cambridge, March 2024

​​​​​​

bottom of page