Department of English
Suzanne Gauch
Suzanne Gauch's research and teaching interests include postcolonial studies, with a focus on literary and cultural exchanges between the Islamic world and Europe, gender studies, and the cinemas of the global South. She has published and has forthcoming articles on the politics of literary borrowing in the global marketplace, feminism in Moroccan film, the limits of self refashioning in the post-independence nation-state, exile and representational authority, reconfigurations of agency in post-independence Anglophone and Francophone writing, the Algerian war of independence in French film, and the resistance of the body in Frantz Fanon's revolutionary dialectics. Her book, Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), analyzes how contemporary North African writers and filmmakers legitimate their own artistic practices and political engagements--and navigate increasingly complex circuits of transnational exchange--by paying tribute to the legendary storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights.
Her second book project, tentatively titled Claiming al Andalus: Islamic Spain in Postcolonial Literature and Film , studies the trope of al-Andalus—or Islamic Spain—in the work of postcolonial writers and filmmakers, exploring its relation to the diminished status of socialist, liberal, and postcolonial discourses in the Islamic world.
She has recently taught senior seminars in Postcolonial Literature and the Global Politics of Food, and Revolutionary Literature and Film in Algeria and Cuba, advanced seminars in Feminist Theory and Queer Theory, introductory courses in Sub-Saharan African Film and the Postcolonial Bildungsroman, and the Introduction to the English Major (English Gateway). Her graduate seminars include After Revolution: Post-Postcolonial Studies, Transnational Feminisms, Postcolonial Theory and Practices, and Al Andalus and Postcolonial Futures.