Michael Grace

Prior to beginning my PhD at KCL, funded by a King's A&H PGR Scholarship, I completed a BA in French and German at Jesus College, Cambridge, and an MA in French at UCL.

• Francophone thought bearing a relation to deconstruction (particularly Malabou, Stiegler, Nancy, Glissant, Mbembe)
• Francophone cinema and literature
• Spectatorship
• Film and ethics

My PhD research focuses on the concept of plasticity in film theory and Francophone thought. In the thesis, I probe the influence of early discourses of plasticity on philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and draw on case studies from contemporary French filmmaking to think through an ethics of the image in transformation – in other words, how film appeals to change in formal and ethical terms.

Beyond the thesis, I have published an article on the nightclub in the films of Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat in French Screen Studies, which won the Susan Hayward Prize 2021. I also have a forthcoming book chapter on Chris Marker and Catherine Malabou, and an article forthcoming in Screen on Bruno Dumont and what I call the 'disaffection-image'. In the latter, I read Dumont's novel deployment and dereliction of the close-up as a contrarian unsettling of broader political and film theoretical investments in the affective power of the image.