PhD, Graduate, Department of French and Italian, Northwestern University

Graduate Alumni Biographies

Hakim Abderrezak
Hakim Abderrezak, Ph.D. 2006, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. His areas of research and teaching include Beur and Maghrebi literature and cinema. He is the author of the following publications: "The Modern Harem in Moknèche’s Le Harem de Mme Osmane and Viva Laldjérie," The Journal of North African Studies, 12:3 (September 2007): 347-368; "Halfaouine - l’enfant des terrasses : L’individu - oiseau face à la communauté," Expressions maghrébines 5:1 (Summer 2006): 83-96; "L’Facances, ‘that’s how we call them’" in Tingis: A Moroccan-American Magazine of Ideas and Culture (August 2006).

Taïeb Berrada
Taïeb Berrada Ph.D. in French, completed his dissertation “L’Intrus postcolonial maghrébin dans la littérature, le cinéma et la bande dessinée francophones” in June 2007. He specializes in Francophone Maghrebian Literatures and Cultures, Maghrebian Diaspora in France, Critical Theory, Postcolonial Theory and Film, and Francophone bande dessinée. He is currently Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Irvine. He has published in Expressions Maghrébines and Nouvelles Etudes Francophones.

Natalie Edwards
Natalie Edwards, Ph.D. 2005, is now in her third year as Assistant Professor of French at Wagner College. She is the Coordinator of French Studies there and has published articles on Helene Cixous, Simone de Beauvoir, Paule Constant and Aminata Sow Fall. She has given conference presentations in a variety of symposia including in Australia, Dublin, the UK, Canada and North Africa. She is the Director of French Language and Literatures in the NorthEast Modern Languages Association, is co-editor (with Christopher Hogarth) of Gender and Displacement; Representations of "Home" in Francophone Women's Autobiography, and currently has a book manuscript entitled "Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Francophone Women's Autobiography" under consideration for publication.

Nathalie Etoké
Nathalie Etoké, Ph.D. 2006, is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University. Her research interests include contemporary African cinema and fiction, African American and African feminist theories, portrayals of gender, sexuality, identity and the struggle for transcendence in postcolonial Francophone literature, and postcolonial and diaspora studies (France, Africa, Antilles, Maghreb). She has published numerous articles, poems, a short story, and her forthcoming novel, Le rêve de Weli, has been accepted for publication in 2008 by Presses de l’Université Catholique d’Afrique Centrale.

Christopher Hogarth
Christopher Hogarth, Ph.D. 2005, is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Wagner College, Staten Island. He has published an article in SITES: Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and has a co-edited book (with Natalie Edwards) called Gender and Displacement: Representations of Home in Francophone Women's Autobiography forthcoming in 2008 with Cambridge Scholars Press.

Kristy Clark Koth
Kristy Clark Koth completed her dissertation, "The Subversive Power of Transvestism in the Theater of Sand, Genet and Benmussa" in 2000 and published an article on Jean Genet in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, 321: Twentieth-Century French Dramatists (2006): 161-174. She currently lives in Munich, Germany where she is co-owner of the publishing house Edition bi:libri, a small company specializing in bilingual and multilingual children's books. Although her work covers all aspects of the publishing business, her principle duties include selecting and editing manuscripts for publication, coordinating the translations of the manuscripts into 7 languages (English, French, Greek, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish), developing pedagogical standards and pedagogical support material for Kindergarten and grade schools who use the bi:libri books and coordinating the audio recordings of native speakers for the CDs which sometimes accompany the books. She is also the mother of two bilingual children, who could have used her books when they were younger!

Dominique Licops
Dominique Licops, Ph.D. 2002, is a Lecturer in the French Department and the School of Continuing Studies at Northwestern, and has occasionally taught courses for the Gender Studies program at Northwestern as well as the Language of Foreign Languages at DePaul University. She has published articles on issues of identity and its representation in images and metaphors, and on the work of Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Assia Djebar, Brigitte Roüan in Thamyris and Women’s Studies Quarterly among others.

Vinay Swamy
Vinay Swamy is Assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College, NY, where he teaches Contemporary Francophone literature and film. His publications include essays on novels by Azouz Begag and Maryse Condé. Vinay formerly worked as an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Washington. His articles on the PaCS debate and kinship structures in contemporary French films, on Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette and on the 2003 film L'Esquive by Abdellatif Kechiche have appeared in journals including Comparative Literature Studies and Studies in French Cinema. At present, he is working on a book length study tentatively entitled 'Interpreting the Republic: Marginalization and Resistance in Postcolonial Metropolitan French Novels and Films.'