Vincent BornertVisiting Assistant Professor
Biography
Vincent Bornert is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the French and Italian Department at Emory University for the academic year 2025-26. His research focuses on 20th and 21st French and Francophone cinema and literature, particularly that of the French banlieues and Corsica. His work approaches film and media studies through postmodern theories of representation, exploring geographies of marginality and underrepresented film spaces. He also practices film photography, with an emphasis on themes such as nostalgia, loneliness, and memory.
His dissertation, ‘Banlieue-film: On the Troubled Spatiality of a Genre-Simulacre’, examines how the French banlieue functions as a simulacrum, a hyperreal construct shaped by urban planning and mass media, where mediated representations become indistinguishable from perceived reality. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s theoretical framework and postmodern thought, it analyzes contemporary banlieue cinema as a “genre-simulacre” that challenges a pervasive myth first revealed in Mathieu Kassovitz’s seminal work, La Haine. By exploring innovative aesthetics, narrative strategies, and generic hybridization, it demonstrates how these films move beyond social realism to expose the systemic forces sustaining the simulation, offering narratives of radical freedom and redefinition that transcend architectural boundaries and critique the elusive nature of truth in our mass-mediated world.
His current research project focuses on the island of Corsica, its history, and its representations in film and literature. It aims at unfolding the singularity of Corsican cinema and the relationship between the island, the cinematic medium, and French audiences. Advocating for a Corsican national cinema, he explores the ambivalence of the Corsican identity on screen(s), from the early 20th century to present-day.
Publications
Bornert, Vincent. 2025. “Corsica on Screen: Historicity, Identity, and Perspectives for a Corsican National Cinema.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 29 (3): 370–88. doi:10.1080/17409292.2025.2505322.
Film reviews:
Review of À son image dir. Thierry de Peretti. The French Review, vol. 99 no. 2, 2025, p. 192-193. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tfr.2025.a976540.
Review of Le Royaume dir. Julien Colonna. [in press, The French Review]
Review of Le Mohican dir. Frédéric Farrucci. [in press, The French Review]
Education
Ph.D. French Studies, Emory University, 2025.
M.A. Cinéma et Audiovisuel, Université Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 2019.
M.A. Cinéma et Audiovisuel, Université de Montréal (one-year exchange program), 2019.
B.A. Hypokhâgne, Khâgne (French Literature and English), University of Strasbourg, 2017.
