Olivia Landry
Biographic Data
| ID | 3864435 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Olivia Landry |
| GIVEN NAMES | Olivia |
| FAMILY NAME | Landry |
| SIGNATURE | LANDRY O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lehigh University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3779-6925 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Wild Side of Maternal Regret
More than a decade after Orna Donath (2015) confronted the public with the reality of maternal regret, there is still widespread hostility toward the topic and, in the U.S. context, a dearth of discussion. This essay reflects on Donath’s concept of “regretting motherhood” alongside older and newer theories of regret from Janet Landman (1993), Elizabeth Spelman (1997), and Sara Ahmed (2004/2015), to Brian Price (2017) and Andrea Long Chu (2024). I…
In/Audibility and Climate Crisis in Roter Himmel
“Ich höre nichts” (“I don't hear anything”) is the telltale first line of the main protagonist, Leon (Thomas Schubert), in Christian Petzold's Roter Himmel (Afire). But for someone who purportedly hears nothing, Leon is remarkably plagued by noise, especially the nocturnal admixture of music and moans issuing from the bedroom of the mysterious guest, Nadja (Paula Beer), at the seaside cottage where the film is set. Petzold delights in playing wit…
Simone Pfleger. Un timely Bodies, Un timely Aesthetics: Temporality, Relationality, and Intimacy in the Cinema of the Berlin School
Listening Back: A Return to A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive
Book Forum on A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive
Jewish Revenge on the German Screen
Post-Holocaust German cinema is rife with the figure of the Jewish victim and accompanying portrayals of Jewish German and non-Jewish German reconciliation. Instrumental in this tradition, heritage filmmaking of the 1990s manufactured undemanding and sentimental historical tales for a mass audience. More recently, a crop of new films does something radically different. This essay tracks Jewish revenge plots in contemporary German film. Films such…
Film as Museum: One-of-a-Kind Objects in Berkun Oya's Bir Başkadır
This article explores the 2020 Turkish Netflix series Bir Başkadır ( Ethos) written and directed by Berkun Oya about contemporary Turkey through its objects. With objects surge memories, which are both personal and collective. From the charged objects that convey private attachments, traumas, and histories to ordinary household trinkets and finally archival audiovisual material, this series assumes the status of museum in its drive to carefully e…
Benjamin and the Archive Today
At a contemporary moment of sweeping scholarly interest in and interrogation of the archive, this brief essay returns to Walter Benjamin. Formulating the archive as a fugacious site of ruin and excavation, Benjamin's approach presents an early counterposition to the modern view of the same as a bulwark of historical permanence and national stability. To illustrate the continuing relevance of Benjamin's work, the essay turns to recent discussions …
A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive
From Elif to Esty? Unorthodox and Turkish German Cinema's Captivity Narrative
The 2020 Netflix drama series Unorthodox draws on tropes from a vexed archive of transcultural cinema, in particular Turkish German cinema. Through the frame of the captivity narrative, this essay examines how the series about a young Hasidic Jewish woman who escapes her family and community in Williamsburg, New York, and flees to Berlin presents culturally determined themes of victimhood, oppression, and gendered subjugation. A comparison with T…
The Beauty and Violence of Horror Vacui: Waiting in Christian Petzold's Transit (2018)
This essay explores Christian Petzold's 2018 film Transit through the lens of waiting. In many ways a condition of our historical present, waiting is frequently perceived and conceptualized by contemporary theorists as an exercise of utter emptiness, entrapment, and submission. A portrait of German refugees in transit in Marseille during World War Two and based on Anna Seghers's 1942 novel by the same name, Transit is attuned to the experience of…
Turkish Delights with an Aftertaste
Hop-Çiki-Yaya Polisiyesi is a Turkish crime novel series by Mehmet Murat Somer that appeared between 2003 and 2004. The series is set in the trans world of Istanbul, and the hero/heroine is a gender-nonbinary sleuth. The present essay explores the paradox at the heart of this series, which on the one hand offers an affirmative portrait of a sex-positive and sociopolitically mobile trans world, and on the other hand exposes the reality of trans mu…
East German letters to Angela Davis: From myth to solidarities unfolding
This essay applies the lens of myth to convey new insight in the well-documented historical context of the National United Campaign to Free Angela Davis (NUFCAD) in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It seeks to interpret and offer meaning to the thousands of letters and postcards written in support of Angela Davis while she was on trial in the US between 1971–1972. A reading with Roland Barthes’s theory of myth as an operative form of power u…
Sex Changes with Kleist
Katrin Pahl’s recent study offers compelling new readings of Heinrich von Kleist’s dramatic works, in particular The Broken Jug, Penthesilea, The Battle of Herrmann, and Katie from Heilbronn as que
Searching for a Storyteller, Remediating the Archive: Philip Scheffner's Halfmoon Files
Spurred by the search for the identity of a colonial soldier captured in Germany during World War I, who left his trace in the form of a story in the sound archive in Berlin, Philip Scheffner's documentary film The Halfmoon Files (2007) is an excavation of an obscured moment in early twentieth-century German history. By way of the figure of the storyteller, read intertextually with Walter Benjamin, this article explores Scheffner's film as the si…
On the Politics of Love and Trans-Migrant Theater in Germany
With a focus on Germany's first explicitly trans- play, Sasha Marianna Salzmann's 2016 Meteoriten (Meteorites), this article pursues the possibility of thinking about trans- and love as forces that at once ontologically transform and phenomenologically (re)orient us away from an “unchosen starting place” (Susan Stryker) and toward the possibility of joy embodied in Salzmann's figure of “the migrant of love.” Considered in a broader social and pol…
Forum: Migration Studies
Color/blindness in Sheri Hagen's Auf den zweiten Blick
This essay examines the themes of blindness and colorblindness and their possible intersections in the first feature film of the Nigerian German director Sheri Hagen, Auf den zweiten Blick / At Second Glance (2012). Expressly about living with blindness and not about race in Germany, the film instead invites the viewer to engage with the topic of colorblindness in an altogether indirect manner. Considered within the context of transnational film,…
Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle. Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism
Jewish joke telling inMuttersprache Mameloschn: Performing queer intervention on the German stage
This essay explores the central role of Jewish joke telling in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (first performed in 2012). Subversively revealing the problematic of essentializing cultural, national, and even sexual identity, Jewish joke telling figures as a performance of social and political resistance and disidentification in this play. Engaging with Jack Halberstam’s queer epistemology of failure and José Esteban Muñoz’…
Wir sind alle Oranienplatz”! Space for Refugees and Social Justice in Berlin
For nearly two years Berlin-Kreuzberg was the site of a large-scale protest camp set up to mobilize awareness and activism with respect to asylum politics in Germany and Europe. Located on the central square Oranienplatz, this protest incited broader questions about the relationship between cities and citizenship and the geopolitical role of urban space. The present article traces the emergence and development of this protest movement, referred t…
Dance and the Theatricality of Berlin School Cinema
The Berlin School has been identified as a new cinema movement of realist-style observation, deliberate pacing, and reductive aesthetics. This essay proposes a new direction of inquiry. A comprehensive exploration of the dance scenes in a host of films opens up the Berlin School as a cinema of spectacle and theatricality that harks back to the aesthetics of the early “cinema of attractions.” Careful examinations of the complex dance scenes in Val…
Wir sind alle Oranienplatz”! Space for Refugees and Social Justice in Berlin
For nearly two years Berlin-Kreuzberg was the site of a large-scale protest camp set up to mobilize awareness and activism with respect to asylum politics in Germany and Europe. Located on the central square Oranienplatz, this protest incited broader questions about the relationship between cities and citizenship and the geopolitical role of urban space. The present article traces the emergence and development of this protest movement, referred t…
Dance and the Theatricality of Berlin School Cinema
The Berlin School has been identified as a new cinema movement of realist-style observation, deliberate pacing, and reductive aesthetics. This essay proposes a new direction of inquiry. A comprehensive exploration of the dance scenes in a host of films opens up the Berlin School as a cinema of spectacle and theatricality that harks back to the aesthetics of the early “cinema of attractions.” Careful examinations of the complex dance scenes in Val…
Wir sind alle Oranienplatz”! Space for Refugees and Social Justice in Berlin
For nearly two years Berlin-Kreuzberg was the site of a large-scale protest camp set up to mobilize awareness and activism with respect to asylum politics in Germany and Europe. Located on the central square Oranienplatz, this protest incited broader questions about the relationship between cities and citizenship and the geopolitical role of urban space. The present article traces the emergence and development of this protest movement, referred t…
Jewish joke telling inMuttersprache Mameloschn: Performing queer intervention on the German stage
This essay explores the central role of Jewish joke telling in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (first performed in 2012). Subversively revealing the problematic of essentializing cultural, national, and even sexual identity, Jewish joke telling figures as a performance of social and political resistance and disidentification in this play. Engaging with Jack Halberstam’s queer epistemology of failure and José Esteban Muñoz’…
Forum: Migration Studies
Color/blindness in Sheri Hagen's Auf den zweiten Blick
This essay examines the themes of blindness and colorblindness and their possible intersections in the first feature film of the Nigerian German director Sheri Hagen, Auf den zweiten Blick / At Second Glance (2012). Expressly about living with blindness and not about race in Germany, the film instead invites the viewer to engage with the topic of colorblindness in an altogether indirect manner. Considered within the context of transnational film,…
Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle. Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism
On the Politics of Love and Trans-Migrant Theater in Germany
With a focus on Germany's first explicitly trans- play, Sasha Marianna Salzmann's 2016 Meteoriten (Meteorites), this article pursues the possibility of thinking about trans- and love as forces that at once ontologically transform and phenomenologically (re)orient us away from an “unchosen starting place” (Susan Stryker) and toward the possibility of joy embodied in Salzmann's figure of “the migrant of love.” Considered in a broader social and pol…
Searching for a Storyteller, Remediating the Archive: Philip Scheffner's Halfmoon Files
Spurred by the search for the identity of a colonial soldier captured in Germany during World War I, who left his trace in the form of a story in the sound archive in Berlin, Philip Scheffner's documentary film The Halfmoon Files (2007) is an excavation of an obscured moment in early twentieth-century German history. By way of the figure of the storyteller, read intertextually with Walter Benjamin, this article explores Scheffner's film as the si…
The Beauty and Violence of Horror Vacui: Waiting in Christian Petzold's Transit (2018)
This essay explores Christian Petzold's 2018 film Transit through the lens of waiting. In many ways a condition of our historical present, waiting is frequently perceived and conceptualized by contemporary theorists as an exercise of utter emptiness, entrapment, and submission. A portrait of German refugees in transit in Marseille during World War Two and based on Anna Seghers's 1942 novel by the same name, Transit is attuned to the experience of…
Turkish Delights with an Aftertaste
Hop-Çiki-Yaya Polisiyesi is a Turkish crime novel series by Mehmet Murat Somer that appeared between 2003 and 2004. The series is set in the trans world of Istanbul, and the hero/heroine is a gender-nonbinary sleuth. The present essay explores the paradox at the heart of this series, which on the one hand offers an affirmative portrait of a sex-positive and sociopolitically mobile trans world, and on the other hand exposes the reality of trans mu…
East German letters to Angela Davis: From myth to solidarities unfolding
This essay applies the lens of myth to convey new insight in the well-documented historical context of the National United Campaign to Free Angela Davis (NUFCAD) in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It seeks to interpret and offer meaning to the thousands of letters and postcards written in support of Angela Davis while she was on trial in the US between 1971–1972. A reading with Roland Barthes’s theory of myth as an operative form of power u…
Sex Changes with Kleist
Katrin Pahl’s recent study offers compelling new readings of Heinrich von Kleist’s dramatic works, in particular The Broken Jug, Penthesilea, The Battle of Herrmann, and Katie from Heilbronn as que
A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive
From Elif to Esty? Unorthodox and Turkish German Cinema's Captivity Narrative
The 2020 Netflix drama series Unorthodox draws on tropes from a vexed archive of transcultural cinema, in particular Turkish German cinema. Through the frame of the captivity narrative, this essay examines how the series about a young Hasidic Jewish woman who escapes her family and community in Williamsburg, New York, and flees to Berlin presents culturally determined themes of victimhood, oppression, and gendered subjugation. A comparison with T…
Film as Museum: One-of-a-Kind Objects in Berkun Oya's Bir Başkadır
This article explores the 2020 Turkish Netflix series Bir Başkadır ( Ethos) written and directed by Berkun Oya about contemporary Turkey through its objects. With objects surge memories, which are both personal and collective. From the charged objects that convey private attachments, traumas, and histories to ordinary household trinkets and finally archival audiovisual material, this series assumes the status of museum in its drive to carefully e…
Benjamin and the Archive Today
At a contemporary moment of sweeping scholarly interest in and interrogation of the archive, this brief essay returns to Walter Benjamin. Formulating the archive as a fugacious site of ruin and excavation, Benjamin's approach presents an early counterposition to the modern view of the same as a bulwark of historical permanence and national stability. To illustrate the continuing relevance of Benjamin's work, the essay turns to recent discussions …
In/Audibility and Climate Crisis in Roter Himmel
“Ich höre nichts” (“I don't hear anything”) is the telltale first line of the main protagonist, Leon (Thomas Schubert), in Christian Petzold's Roter Himmel (Afire). But for someone who purportedly hears nothing, Leon is remarkably plagued by noise, especially the nocturnal admixture of music and moans issuing from the bedroom of the mysterious guest, Nadja (Paula Beer), at the seaside cottage where the film is set. Petzold delights in playing wit…
Simone Pfleger. Un timely Bodies, Un timely Aesthetics: Temporality, Relationality, and Intimacy in the Cinema of the Berlin School
Listening Back: A Return to A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive
Book Forum on A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive
Jewish Revenge on the German Screen
Post-Holocaust German cinema is rife with the figure of the Jewish victim and accompanying portrayals of Jewish German and non-Jewish German reconciliation. Instrumental in this tradition, heritage filmmaking of the 1990s manufactured undemanding and sentimental historical tales for a mass audience. More recently, a crop of new films does something radically different. This essay tracks Jewish revenge plots in contemporary German film. Films such…
The Wild Side of Maternal Regret
More than a decade after Orna Donath (2015) confronted the public with the reality of maternal regret, there is still widespread hostility toward the topic and, in the U.S. context, a dearth of discussion. This essay reflects on Donath’s concept of “regretting motherhood” alongside older and newer theories of regret from Janet Landman (1993), Elizabeth Spelman (1997), and Sara Ahmed (2004/2015), to Brian Price (2017) and Andrea Long Chu (2024). I…
Art (14 works) · History (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Art history (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · German (8 works) · History (8 works)