Terri Francis

Terri Francis earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2004, where she specialized in African American literature and culture. This background provides a broad, interdisciplinary cultural context for her current work in cinema studies. As an Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Program and the Department of African American Studies at Yale University, her courses on African American cinema, avant-garde cinema, black women’s filmmaking and the Harlem Renaissance focus on film as a social and aesthetic text, while attending to its unique structures through close analysis. Her manuscript, Under a Paris Moon: Josephine Baker, Primitivism and the Harlem Renaissance, examines Baker’s stardom as a site for thinking about the transatlantic exchanges between Paris and Harlem through close readings of Baker’s films as well as citations of Baker in recent international cinema.