Research Expertise and Interest

Border studies, race, postcolonialism, Politics of aesthetic form, nineteenth-century French studies, memory studies, World War Two, Holocaust studies, critical refugee studies, contemporary fiction and film

Research Description

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French and Director of Berkeley's Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender,  the Institute of European Studies and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.  Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; race and postcolonial studies; aesthetics and biopolitics;  postwar French and Francophone culture; transcultural memory studies. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley's highest recognition for teaching. Her first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaims Baudelaire's aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique; her second book, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), addresses the transnational deployment of complicity in the aftermath of the Shoah. Her most recent book, Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at the Edges of Europe (forthcoming with Fordham in 2025) addresses migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe's current refugee "crisis, and was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022). She currently serves as a co-PI (with Judith Butler, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Shannon Jackson) on a Mellon grant for A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times.