Caroline Laurent

Professor Laurent began teaching at AUP in 2021. At AUP, she teaches French as well as courses on Francophone cultures and literatures. Before joining AUP, she taught Postcolonial Studies at Sciences Po - Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France, African and Comparative Literature at King's College London in England, and French Language and Romance Literatures at Harvard University in the United States.

Laurent's research deals with twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literatures and cultures, with special emphasis on Metropolitan France, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. Her book manuscript, The Words of Others: Remembering and Writing Genocide as an Indirect Witness, examines literary and graphic representations of genocidal violence. She focuses on the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Khmer Rouge genocide and mass killings in Cambodia. Specifically, by connecting the authors’ representational strategies to critical theories related to memory studies, she examines how indirect witnesses, that is individuals who did not literally or personally experience genocide, problematize their own testimonial acts. Her newest project entitled Connected Histories of (Post)Coloniality: Circulation and Reception of Art Representing a Diverse Francophone Past considers the representation and dissemination of histories through art forms, with the aim of dismantling a monolithic national(istic) narrative. By insisting on their creation, their circulation, and their reception, she shows how these historical representations encourage the formation of a new heritage that encompasses different communities. The foregoing creative processes also point to their perpetual transformation that would allow for new decolonized epistemologies and ways to illuminate the past in a context which is Francophone, but also alive in its plural, global, as well as multilingual realities.