I am a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century French literature and culture, with specific interests in queer and HIV studies, as well as Holocaust studies. Some of my recent research has focused on the questions community and republican universalism, dealing with issues such as the engagement of urban spaces by minoritized groups, the cultural and political uses of "the Republic," representations of collective disasters (AIDS, the Holocaust), masculinity, the concepts of neighborhood and family, etc. My latest book is titled The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV. I believe that fear of contact is a defining characteristic of modern Western culture, and that this fear is codified through tact, a policing practice designed to deal with social discomfort and with the unsettling awareness of the boundaries separating norms and bodies. But I also think that tact may be reclaimed to envision new forms of sociality. With particular emphasis on HIV disclosure, I examine the ways in which we may use tact to accept, rather than avoid, risky contact and to reappraise the cultural meanings of HIV/AIDS. A new project picks up where The Nearness of Others left off. In that book, I wondered what happens to reason when the body touches it and reminds it of its lost corporeality. I now take my investigation further with Think Strange and ask what it means to respond to calls one doesn’t understand. I turn for answers to queer films from several countries—France, but also Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, the U.S… These works of art let us examine how the dual experience of wonderment and sensuality can make thought more receptive to its own strangeness, and people hospitable to actual strangers. This line of inquiry also dovetails with my increasing interest in transnational Asian studies, particularly in colonial Indochina and contemporary Chinese migrations.