Ramla Bedoui

Ramla Bédoui grew up and was schooled until high school in Tunisia in both Arabic and French.

She finished her Ph.D at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, under the direction of Professeur Bertrand Marchal on the construction of individual and collective memory within the works of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. She investigated how these authors shaped contemporary French society, and notably how their conceptions of urban space and history took hold as a shared collective memory, and as a lieu de mémoire (Nora). Drawing on Ricoeur, Bédoui also showed how these poets contributed to theories elaborated by Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida.

She is currently working on a monograph about the conflict in North Africa between secularists, feminists and islamists, from the XIXth century until the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and how that conflict has been influenced by both French and Arabic-language political, philosophical, and literary traditions. She takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing to bear political and religious history, to show how that struggle has been encoded within the collective memory of post-colonial literature, cinema, and theatre, such as in Djebar, Sebbar, Mernissi, Khatibi, Messadi, Tlili, and Jaziri. She further explores minority issues in Maghreb and in “Beur” and “Urban” literature, and in the cinéma de banlieue. 

Prof. Bédoui has lectured in the US and internationally and has taught classes on Francophone literature and history, feminism and women’s bodies, the history and representation of revolutionary French and Francophone women in collective memories, and on conflicts in Islam and Muslim communities. 

Bédoui has given French Language classes at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels and classes in Arabic at an introductory level. She has also taught French as a Foreign Language (FLE) and provided instruction in social skills to first- and second-generations immigrants in Seine Saint-Denis, France.