FLL Faculty
Raji Vallury - Director of Graduate Studies & Associate Professor of French
Contact Information
Ortega Hall 319C University of New Mexico Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures Albuquerque, NM 87131-1146 Fax: (505) 277-3599 Email:
Educational History
Ph.D., in French Literature, University of Pittsburgh.
Title of dissertation:
The Blind Spot in a Dream of Dissymmetry. Directed by Professor Yves Citton.
M.A., French Literature, University of Pittsburgh.
Certificat de Maîtrise, Littérature française générale et comparée, Université de Nantes, France.
B.A., French Literature, Ramnarain Ruia College - University of Bombay, India.
B.A., Psychology, Sophia College - University of Bombay, India.
Research Interests
- 19th and 20th-century French and Francophone Literature
Dr. Vallury obtained her B.A. in French Literature from the University of Bombay, India, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century French literature, the North African novel of French expression, feminist studies, literary theory, and post-colonial and cultural studies. She is the author of Surfacing the Politics of Desire: Literature, Feminism, and Myth (University of Toronto Press, August 2008), and has published articles in edited volumes with Duke University Press, Les Presses Universitaires de Rennes, and the journal Novel. The common thread linking Dr. Vallury’s varied research interests is the specific question of the relationship between literature and politics, or how literature ‘does’ politics. She is currently preparing a book manuscript on the politics of national allegory in the Algerian novel.
Selected Publications
Books
- ‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire: Literature, Feminism, and Myth.
(University of Toronto Press 2008).
Articles & Book Chapters
- Politicizing Art in Deleuze and Rancière: The Case of Postcolonial Literature.
In Jacques Rancière: History, Aesthetics, Politics
ed. Philip Watts and Gabriel Rockhill. (Duke University Press 2009). - Writing through the Walls of the Political: Deleuze, Rancière, and Virginia Woolf.
In L’impersonnel en littérature: Explorations critiques et théoriques.
ed. Hélène Aji, Brigitte Félix, Anthony Larson, and Hélène Lecossois.
(Presses Universitaires de Rennes, January 2009). - Walking the Tightrope between Memory and History:
Metaphor in Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert.
In The Form of Postcolonial African Fiction. In Novel: A Forum on Fiction.
ed. Susan Andrade. (Spring/Summer 2008). - Pierre et Jean or The Erring of Oedipus.
In Dalhousie French Studies. 71. (Summer 2005).
Teaching Interests
- 19th-century French Literature
- North African Literature
- Modern and Contemporary French Culture
- French Cinema
- Gender Studies
Representative Courses
- FREN 542 - Sublime Mediocrity: The Novel Art of Republican Equality in 19th-century France
- FREN 542 - Inscribing Democracy in the Republic of Letters:
The People, Art, and the Artistic Exception in 19th-century France - FREN 580 - Metaphors of Nation in the Algerian Novel
- FREN 580 | COMP 580 - The North African Novel
- COMP 580 - Women of Islam: Writers, Thinkers, and Filmmakers from North Africa
- FREN 465 -A Cinematic Tour de France: Contemporary French Society through Film
- FREN 352 - The Modern French Novel: Aesthetics and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France