Research
I work on contemporary French and Francophone literature, especially on the ways narrative form shapes the representation of migration, minority presence, and social conflict in France and in other French-language contexts. My research moves between literature, graphic narrative, film, and television, with particular attention to character, language, and media. I am interested in how contemporary texts assign voice, centrality, and narrative consequence, and in how they rework inherited scripts shaped by colonial history, social realism, and genre.
Multilingualism, translation, and writing in French across different literary traditions also form an important part of this work. What happens to literary form when French becomes a language of displacement, negotiation, or aesthetic reinvention, and how stories change as they move across literary and cultural borders? Between page and screen, text and image? Across these areas, literature and visual culture are approached as sites where questions of recognition, conflict, and belonging are not only represented, but formally configured.
Presenting on Naomi Fontaine’s Shuni at Sorbonne Université Abu Dhabi, 29 February 2024.
Current directions
My current work includes a book project on Maghrebi characters in contemporary French fiction and visual culture, centered on character construction and the narrative roles assigned to recurrent figures across a broad corpus from the 1970s to the present. I am also developing new research on French-language literary fields in Belgium and Switzerland, with particular attention to plurality, institutions, and the conditions that shape literary visibility. A further line of work turns to Braille, tactile form, and editorial mediation, extending my interest in literary form into questions of reading and textual materiality.