About Me
Welcome to my webpage! I'm glad you're here. My name is Maïté Marciano.
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Williams College. Previously I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Centre College. I received a PhD from Northwestern University conferred jointly by the Comparative Literary Studies Program and the Department of French and Italian in Spring 2022. My graduate training also includes a Master of Arts in Aesthetics and Art Theory from Kingston University’s Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy in the U.K., and one year at the École Normale Supérieure as a pensionnaire étrangère.
My research focuses on modern and contemporary French and Francophone literature, with particular attention to questions of literary form, affect, ethics, and political (un)belonging. My first book project, The French Novel in the Time of Disaffection, offers a literary history of disaffection in relation to “neutral writing,” examining how writers have employed anti-cathartic affects to respond to ethical and political forms of violence, from the period of the Occupation and the Vichy regime to the beginning of the twenty-first century. An article related to this project, entitled “L’absence et le neutre: Analyse d’un écart entre Camus, Duras et Blanchot,” has been published in La Revue des lettres modernes, and a second one is forthcoming in French Studies. My second research project addresses questions of belonging and solidarity in twentieth-century diasporic writings of the Mediterranean, focusing especially on Jewish and Black émigré writers in Marseille.