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Jill Jarvis

Associate Professor, Department of French; Director of Graduate Studies, Council on African Studies
Jill Jarvis

Jill Jarvis specializes in the aesthetics and politics of North Africa. Her forthcoming book, Decolonizing Memory : Algeria and the Politics of Testimony, brings together close readings of fiction with analyses of juridical, theoretical, and activist texts to illuminate both the nature of violence and the stakes of literary study in a time of unfinished decolonization. She is also at work on a second book project, Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara, which envisions the Sahara as a site of material, intellectual, and linguistic exchanges that challenge both disciplinary boundaries and received notions of African studies. Other work appears in New Literary HistoryPMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, and Expressions maghébrines.

In her teaching as well as her research, she is dedicated to questioning the assumptions of area studies and methodological orthodoxies.  Her work centers the aesthetic and the literary, making the case for literature as constitutive—rather than simply reflective—of political agency.

Publications

Translations of essays by Zakya Daoud, Mohamed el Bérini, and Ahmed Zrikah, in Lamalif : A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco During the Years of Lead (1966-1988), ed. Brahim el Guabli and Ali Alalou. Forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.

‘Lines of Flight : Laredj and Djaout Beyond the Fiction of Terror.’ Expressions maghrébines, special issue on Tahar Djaout, vol. 17, summer 2018, pp. 83-101.

‘Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics: A Postcolonial Maghreb Without Borders,’ with Brahim El Guabli.  Introduction to co-edited special volume (double issue) of the same title.  The Journal of North African Studies vol. 23, nos. 1-2, January-March 2018.

‘Inheriting Assia Djebar,’ with Anjuli Gunaratne.  PMLA 131.1 (2016), pp. 116-124.

‘Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben’s Silence.’  New Literary History vol. 45, no. 4 (Autumn 2014), pp. 707-728.  Winner of the Ralph Cohen Prize.   

Teaching

Undergraduate

  • FREN 012, Imaginary Maps : World Literature & French Empire (first year seminar, writing credit)
  • FREN 170, Introduction to French Literary Study (in French)
  • FREN 215, Introduction to Maghrebi Literature
  • FREN 414, Afterlives of Algeria’s Revolution (in French)
  • FREN 417, Postcolonial Cities : Reading the Francophone Metropolis
  • Deserts, Oceans, Islands : Literature of Migration & Refuge (new seminar Spring 2019)

Graduate

  • FREN 942, Decolonizing Memory
  • FREN 965, On Violence : Politics & Aesthetics Across the Maghreb
  • FREN 696, Deserts//Oceans//Islands

Affiliations

Humanities Quadrangle, 320 York St., Room 370
Phone: +1 (203) 432-4906