
Contact Information
Office Hours
[1] https://outlook.office.com/bookwithme/user/599e3efe76694545b8cfce735e906802@illinois.edu?anonymous&ep=plink
Research Interests
- Sexuality, Race, & Citizenship
- HIV/AIDS in cultural productions
- Queerness in Francophone North Africa
- Discourse analysis
- Translation studies/Translation theory
Research Description
My research is informed by intersection of gender and sexuality in Francophone communities primarily in North Africa and the Levant. I am interested in expression of sexual identity and citizenship and how individuals navigate these issues in relationship to society and familial structures both in France and in their native homes.
A second, and equally as important axe of research interests, is in HIV/AIDS studies in France. I investigate and chronicle France's literary and cultural response to HIV/AIDS from the late 80's through today, primarily focusing on corporeal representation and gay male ontology in regard to the disease. I co-edited a special issue on this topic with Contemporary French Civilization. Depictions of corporeality have always been at the center of my research in particular how language structures the body. I co-edited an additional special issue of Contemporary French Civilization on the topic of language and the global French-speaking world that focuses on the (social) body.
Both of these research avenues are tied together by the larger concept of kinship. I am currently preparing a monograph on the politics of filiation in France and how queer forms of belonging navigate universalist ideologies of citizenship and existence.
Additionally, I am currently the Assistant Editor for Contemporary French Civilization an academic journal dedicated to studying all aspects of culture and civilization in the French and Francophone worlds as well as serving in the Steering Committee for the DDFC Collective.
For advising meetings, please schedule here.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Awards and Honors
Lawrence R. Schehr Award Winning Essay, 2021
HRI Summer Faculty Fellow, 2024
HRI Faculty Fellow, 2025-2026
Additional Campus Affiliations
- Gender and Women's Studies
- Program in Translation and Interpretation
selected publications
- "Reconsidering the body: language and racial corporeality in France" Contemporary French Civilization, 50.2, 2025.
- "Queer Itineraries: Exploring the Geography of Gay Paris" in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Paris since 1789, Routledge, 2025.
- "French universalist disparities: A racial capitalist reading of French universalism" French Cultural Studies, 36.1, 2024-2025.
- "Transing the Maghreb: permeable performances of queerness in Abdellah Taïa, Nina Bouraoui, and beyond" Contemporary French Civilization, 49.2, 2024.
- "Erasing Race in France: Social Consequences of Political Idealism" in The Routledge Handbook of French History, Routledge, 2023.
- "Agency, culpability, and police brutality: French reports of death during les contrôles policiers." Contemporary French Civilization, 47.4, 2022. (The 10th Lawrence R. Schemer Memorial Award Winning Essay)
- "Transcendence and Immanence in Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires." Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 32.2, 2022.
- "Subjectivity and Seropositivity: Retranslating Guillaume Dustan." Essays in French Literature and Culture, 59.1, 2022.
- "Decanonizing Contemporary Culture Courses: Teaching Culture with Twitter" Diversity and Decolonization in French Studies. Palgrave, 2022.
- "Kindling Kindships: Sexual Citizenship and Queer Constructions of Masculinity in the Works of Erik Rémès" Revisiting HIV/AIDs in French Culture: Raw Matters. Lexington Books, 2022.
- "Marginal Masculinities: Disidentifying Sexual Performativity Across Abdellah Taïa’s Novels" Abdellah Taïa's Queer Migrations: Non-places, Affect, and Temporalities. Lexington Books, 2021.
- "Forty years of HIV/AIDS narratives. What's next?" Contemporary French Civilization, 46.2, 2021.
- Works of Guillaume Dustan, (translator) Semiotexte 2021.
- "Comment échapper à la honte du Jamel" @nalyses: Revue de Critque et de Théorie Littéraire, 11.3, 2016.