Department of French and Italian Student Faculty Forum Series with Eileen Julien and Oana Panaïté

This past summer, the speakers organized and lead an NEH Summer Institute on "Arts of Survival: Recasting Lives in African Cities,” focusing on contemporary urban culture and arts in Accra, Lagos, Nairobi, New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, characterized by shared African roots and distinctive landscapes, histories and tragedies. They were two of five institute leaders who together selected twenty-one faculty and three graduate student participants from across the U.S., representing an impressively smart and diverse group with expertise across many fields. In this presentation, they will share their organizational, intellectual and emotional experience of this unique event that proved to be lively and enriching as well as contentious and provocative.

Eileen Julien is Director of the IU Institute for Advanced Study and Professor of Comparative Literature, French, and African studies. Her teaching and research focus on the literature and culture of Africa, the Americas and France in their interrelationships. She is co-editor (with Biodun Jeyifo) of The Locations and Dislocations of African Literature: A Dialogue Between Humanities and Social Science Scholars (2016 ) and is the author of “The Extroverted African Novel” (The Novel, vol. I, Moretti, 2002), among other works.

Oana Panaїté is an Associate Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies in French/Francophone Studies at IUB. She has published the monograph Des litte ratures-mondes en français. Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine (2012), and edited a special issue of the journal L'Esprit cre ateur on “The Idea of Literature/La Pense e litte raire” (Fall 2010) as well as a volume entitled Communaute s de lecture: pour une approche dialogique des œuvres classiques et contemporaines (2012).