About
I joined the University of Liverpool in 2021 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-2023) and as a Lecturer in French (since March 2023), having previously worked at the Universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol and Yale University. My research focuses on the histories, texts, and visual cultures produced during and in the aftermath of Belgian and French colonialism. I have a broad range of research interests, from colonial and postcolonial museums to environmental history, and the connections between colonialism and the contemporary global far right. I welcome MRes and PhD enquiries in any of those areas and also on: Francophone and/or global cities, Central African and North African literatures in French, critical theory (post- and decolonial theory, critical animal studies, ecocriticism). I'm currently the Research Environment Lead and the Early-Career Researcher Rep of the Department of Languages, Cultures and Film. I'm also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (now AdvanceHE).
I'm currently running two research projects, 'Re-valuing Local Knowledges: Understanding Voice, Land and Power for Climate Action in Eastern DRC' (funded by a British Academy ODA Challenge-Oriented Research Grant, 2024-25) with my Co-Investigators Prof. Emery Mudinga (Institut Supérieur de Développment Rural, Bukavu, DRC), Dr Bonaventure Munganga (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia), Dr Blake Ewing (University of Nottingham, UK) and Dr Nicola Thomas (Lancaster University, UK), and 'Mapping Internationalist Forms of Antifascist Solidarity: The League of Nation's Archive of Antifascist Communication in response to the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939' (funded by the University of Liverpool's Early Career and Returners Fund, 2024-25) with my colleague Dr Nicola Mathieson (International Relations, University of Liverpool).
Together with Prof. Chris Pearson (University of Liverpool), Dr Rohan Deb Roy (University of Reading) and Dr Shirley Ye (University of Birmingham), I am editing the new 'Liverpool Studies in Environmental History' book series for Liverpool University. For more detail on the aims and scope of the series, please have a look here.
I'm also the editor of the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, the bi-annual journal of the Society of Francophone Studies, and on the editorial board of the Comparative Literature section of Modern Languages Open and a member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Romance Studies.
My research and biography overlap at certain points: I'm a first-generation university graduate and grew up in Germany and in Algeria, my father's native country (unfortunately without picking up much Arabic). I speak French, German, and English and have started learning Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian.