Sarah Benoît

Sarah Benoît completed her BA in French Studies and in English Literature in 1991 at Louisiana State University. Her thesis was entitled “Une lecture d’ Auschwitz et après à la lumière de l’œuvre d’Arthur Rimbaud”. She has also studied at the University of East Anglia in the UK and at the Université de Mons in Belgium. She joined the French Department at Northwestern University in 2002. Her research interests lie in Francophone African and Caribbean literatures of the 20th century with a focus on autobiography, authorship, writing, community, self, and colonial education. Her dissertation on works by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Camara Laye, Gisèle Pineau, and Joseph Zobel explores the intriguing space of education and writing within these literatures as sites of formations of self. While at Northwestern, grants from the Department of French and the Program of African Studies allowed her to travel to Senegal. Thanks to funding from the Department of French, she participated in the 2007 Dartmouth Summer Institute in French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth University.