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. Her first book, The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics, is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press (Oct. 2025). She has several peer-reviewed articles, critical reviews, and interviews published or forthcoming in journals such as Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature; SITES; Comparative Literature; French Politics, Culture, and Society; Contemporary French Civilization; Nineteenth-Century French Studies; Modern Language Notes; H-France Imaginaires, and Theatre Journal. She has also written for public-facing venues like Public Books, The Comics Journal, and The Los Angeles Review of Books and serves on the editorial board of Romanic Review and The French Review. She is founder and chair of the “Comics and Graphic Albums” University Seminar, which meets regularly to discuss academic works-in-progress academic in or related to comics studies. Between 2018 and 2024, she ran the French Department Lecture Series, and she has been the Director of Undergraduate Studies since 2023.

At Columbia, Professor Gabel teaches Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses on 20th- and 21st-century literature, culture, and film. Recent course titles include: “Violence, Politics, and the Graphic Novel,” “Sex, Drugs, and Marxism: France in the 1960s,” “Postwar French Cinema and Bad Taste,” “BD reportage: the Origin and Aesthetics of Comics Journalism,” “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 a Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant. Outside of academia, Aubrey Gabel works as a freelance translator and interpreter, with interests in oral history. She is committed to graduate mentorship and successfully guided doctoral students through their early academic careers, including most recently André Pettman, who is now a tenure-track faculty member at the University of Arizona.

Prof. Gabel’s forthcoming monograph, The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics investigates how literary ludics, or non-conventional formalist practices of aesthetic “play” and “game,” can function as historical and political commentary. As a literary historical investigation that deploys mixed methods, this monograph situates ludics within the fraught political field of post-WWII France, which was articulated around a form-versus-politics binary that continues to influence French literature today. Trapped between the high formalism of the New Novelists and the overt political activity of Sartrean commitment, the French writers studied here sought in literary ludics an alternative, non-proscriptive model for simultaneously being both formalists and political actors. In turn, these writers approached politics as a formal problem, as various literary and linguistic forms enable and restrict different modes of political activity and subjectivity. Turning to case studies from three generations of the literary group Oulipo (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Jacques Jouet) and two non-Oulipian authors (Monique Wittig, François Maspero), this book tracks the changing valences of ludic practices, over the course of the 20^th century, from the height of commitment in the 1950s, to the aftermath of communism in the present. Each chapter unpacks how authors design complex ludic practices to covertly document and engage with contemporary history, as well as to intentionally sidestep contemporary models for the author’s social identity.