Graduate Students from Brazil and England Join the Department as Visiting Student Research Collaborators

Ana Gabriela Dickstein Roiffe from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and Rafael Dernbach from the German Department at the Cambridge University (UK) have come to Princeton under the Visiting Student Research Collaborator (VSRC) program to work with Prof. Thomas Y. Levin during the 2016–17 academic year.

Ms. Roiffe is a PhD Candidate in Literature, Culture and Contemporaneity at PUC-Rio where she is working with Prof. Frederico Oliveira Coelho on a dissertation researching writings for portable cinemas in contemporary art, including works by Hélio Oiticica, Yoko Ono and Jack Smith. Ms. Roiffe will spend the 2016–2017 academic year affiliated with Princeton’s German Dept., funded by the Fulbright Commission and CAPES, the Brazilian National Research Foundation. Advised by Prof. Thomas Y. Levin, she attended classes by Hal Foster and Levin in the Fall semester, consulted with Prof. Irene V. Small in the Dept. of Art and Archaeology, and worked in archives at NYU and MoMA digging up materials related to experimental and expanded cinema from the 50s to the 70s in USA and Brazil. Happily, her efforts yielded scripts of Jack Smith’s slideshows and performances in many versions as well as a copy of the very rare Brazilian 1971 film “Mangue Bangue” by Neville D’Almeida, which was seminal to the conception of Hélio Oiticica’s 1973–74 expanded cinema project “Cosmococas.” Ms. Roiffe also presented a paper on expanded literature in Brazil and Argentina at the “Brazil Week” at Harvard University.

Rafael Dernbach is a Gates Scholar and PhD candidate at the German Department of Cambridge University where he is writing about constructions of futurity in contemporary documentary practices under the supervision of Prof Andrew Webber. His research combines close readings of works by Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Neil Beloufa with analyses of prognostic media such as predictive policing. During his Fall semester stay at Princeton, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK and the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, he was supervised by Prof Thomas Y. Levin and attended his graduate seminar on the rhetorics of surveillance. He also consulted the Jacques Derrida library in Princeton’s Firestone Library, the ACLU archive at Mudd Library and was a regular participant in the activities of the Program in Media and Modernity.