Agnes Varda

Introducing the new Working Group for 2024-2025: Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda (1928-2019) was a formidable and fiercely independent film director whose documentaries and narrative films earned her global recognition and admiration throughout her long career. Though her subjects were diverse, her rangy films were often interested in place, time, women, wandering, portraiture, and a distinctive blend of fact and fiction. The Agnès Varda Working Group plans to study Varda’s multitudinous work with an eye towards what it can teach about documentary’s possibilities and edges, memory’s murkiness, feminism, and the many layers to truth and truth-telling. We plan a multi-pronged scholarly approach into the life and art of the foundational director, and will particularly plan on reframing and connecting her work to the Texas Tech community and beyond. Over the next several years, we will be producing a creative-academic anthology on Varda and her work, hosting a Varda-related conference, and designing and hosting a film festival in Lubbock coinciding with Varda’s 100th birthday. Rigorous, essayistic, and wide-ranging in its approach, the Agnès Varda Working Group plans to underline Varda’s historical importance to larger contemporary conversations around truth-telling, place-making, labor, and feminism.

Agnès Varda Working Group Members:

Lucy Schiller specializes in the essay-form and creative documentary more largely. She received her MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa, where she was a Provost’s Visiting Writer and an Iowa Arts Fellow. She has also held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Iowa Review, Speculative Nonfiction, West Branch, DIAGRAM, Popula, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming from The Paris Review Daily and The Cleveland Review of Books. At Texas Tech, she teaches courses on nonfiction writing and heads Studio E, the English Department’s documentary-oriented lab.

Zara Amdur specializes in feminist philosophy and ancient Greek philosophy. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and an M.A. in Classical Studies from Boston University. Often, her work offers feminist reappraisals of classical texts. Currently, she is working on a series of projects surrounding feminine encoded labor in Plato’s text, including The Outsider Status of Diotima and Penia in Plato’s Symposium as well as Socratic Midwifery: What Plato Learned from His Mother. Before coming to Texas Tech, she held a fellowship with the Humanities Center at Boston University. At Texas Tech, she has taught feminist philosophy, Introduction to Ethics, ancient Greek philosophy, and a graduate course on Plato. She is also the advisor for Texas Tech’s Minorities and Philosophy chapter.

Sonja Stojanovic is a memory studies scholar specializing in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from Brown University and is the author of Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French (Liverpool University Press, 2023), and the co-editor, with Siham Bouamer, of ‘Taking Up Space’: Women at Work in Contemporary France (University of Wales Press, 2022). Her current book project, Cautionary Tale: Gender, Labor, and the Sociocultural Imagination of Cashiers in Modern France, analyzes representations of cashiers in French cultural productions from the 19th century to the present.