Research Expertise and Interest

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 affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Institute of European Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender. Her teaching and research interests span 19th-21st century French and Francophone literature, with a focus on memory studies; the politics of aesthetic form; nineteenth-century poetics of revolution; the Occupation and Holocaust studies, and more recently, critical human rights and refugee studies.  She is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award (2012), UC Berkeley's highest recognition for teaching. Publications include Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015) forthcoming in French translation as Mémoire et Complicité: Héritages de la Shoah (PUV, 2018); The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), and as co-editor, Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies 118/119, 2010). Recent articles include “Calais’s ‘Jungle’: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance”, “Modiano's Memoryscapes" and "Baudelaire and the Poetics of Terror".  Her current book project addresses the contemporary refugee experience in French-speaking testimony, fiction and film.