Aubrey Gabel

Aubrey Gabel (PhD, UC Berkeley 2017) is a specialist in 20^th- and 21^st-century French and Francophone literature, culture, and visual media. Professor Gabel is the author of The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics (Northwestern University Press, 2025), which was featured on the New Books in French Studies podcast. She has published several peer-reviewed articles, critical reviews, and interviews in journals such as Comparative Literature; French Politics, Culture, and Society; Contemporary French Civilization; Nineteenth-Century French Studies; Modern Language Notes; H-France Imaginaires, and Theatre Journal. In addition to writing for public-facing venues like Public Books, The Comics Journal, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, she serves on the editorial boards of Romanic Review and The French Review. At Columbia, she is the founder and chair of the “Comics and Graphic Albums” University Seminar. Between 2018 and 2024, she ran the French Department’s Lecture Series, and between 2023 and 2025, she was the Director of Undergraduate Studies. In Summer 2025, she taught at Bryn Mawr's Institut d’Avignon. She is currently a fellow at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris.

Professor Gabel is an affiliate with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender (ISSG). She teaches Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses for the Department of French, ICLS, and Reid Hall. She is committed to graduate mentorship and has successfully guided doctoral students through their early academic careers. Recent course titles include: “Violence, Politics, and the Graphic Novel,” “Sex, Drugs, and Marxism: France in the 1960s,” “Postwar French Cinema and Bad Taste,” “20^th- and 21^st-century Literary Groups and Avant-Gardes,” “Comics in the World: Graphic Albums & Current Events,” “Global Francophone Cinema,” “Theory of Literature,” and “Sociologies of the Everyday.” Before joining the faculty at Columbia, she taught at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, CU Boulder, and Paris VII. She has received fellowships from the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Berkeley Language Center, the Dartmouth Center for French Cultural Studies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as two Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grants. Outside of academia, Aubrey Gabel works as a freelance translator and interpreter, with interests in oral history.