A past-President of the American Comparative Literature Association, Françoise Lionnet is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies at Harvard. She is also Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles where she served as Director of the African Studies Center (2010-15) and Co-Director of the Mellon Postdoctoral Program “Cultures in Transnational Perspective” (2005-2015). Her current research is primarily on Indian Ocean literary, cultural, and historical studies, in relation to Atlantic and Caribbean Studies. Interested in the longue durée of colonialism from the eighteenth-century to the present, she edited a 2018 translation of the first Creole poet Évariste Parny. Among her other books: Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender and Irony and The Known and the Uncertain: Creole Cosmopolitics of the Indian Ocean (both published in Mauritius in 2012); The Creolization of Theory (2011); Minor Transnationalism (2007); Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (1995); and the pioneering Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (1989). She has published numerous articles in journals such as Yale French Studies, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, L’Esprit créateur, Comparative Literature, Nouvelles études francophones, and PMLA.
