Invited lectures, Université d’Angers

I was invited by Mathilde Bataillé to the Université d’Angers for two lectures that brought my current research into conversation with students and faculty in literary studies. On 21 October, I gave a cours magistral in the undergraduate Literary Culture and Analysis course in Applied Foreign Languages: « Le parcours des personnages franco-maghrébins vers le succès » [The Trajectory of Franco-Maghrebi Characters toward Success]. Drawing on my forthcoming book, I examined the gradual emergence of economically mobile Franco-Maghrebi figures in contemporary French fiction and media, and discussed with students how these characters complicate older narratives of marginality, social realism, and inherited colonial stereotypes.

On 22 October, I presented “Représenter une France postmigratoire dans la bande dessinée contemporaine” [Representing a Postmigrant France in Contemporary Graphic Narrative] in the SFR Confluences / CIRPaLL seminar at the Maison de la Recherche Germaine Tillion. Focusing on contemporary bande dessinée and graphic narrative, the talk explored how postmigration can serve as a critical tool for reading character, memory, belonging, and visual form in a France transformed by immigration. It was especially exciting to discuss with colleagues and students how comics participate in the decolonization of character and open new ways of thinking about postmigrant France through image as well as text.