Right before the screening of Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters on Saturday, February 22, Mina Khavandi gave a talk on women’s cinema and the importance of film studies, connecting the film to her research and acknowledging how the late Prof. Alan Williams taught her to critically see and love cinema.
Outside of academia, Mina is also a poet, and she ended her discussion, “Love and Loss en femme“, with a poetry performance!
Mina Khavandi completed her PhD in the French Department and the Cinema Studies Program at Rutgers. She has taught world cinema and French language and literature courses at Rutgers as well as French film and media courses at the University of Connecticut. Mina’s research locates the rhetorical conceptualizations of the existence of women as authors and on screen, merging historical awareness with a critique of gender imbalances in French cinema. With consideration for feminist film analysis, she studies the expression of feminine anxieties, passions, emotions, and the overall social reality surrounding women in film.