Emmanuel Kattan

Research interests

Politics of memory in contemporary France; postcolonial francophone literature; philosophy and literature; French existentialism; fiction writing

I am a writer and a philosopher, with a strong interest in ethical and historical questions arising at the intersection of collective memory and politics. My first book, Penser le devoir de mémoire (PUF 2002) explores the genealogy of the “duty to remember” and the emergence of community-based collective memories in France. My teaching and my recent research focus on the politics of memory in post-1945 French society, contemporary fiction in the Francophone world, testimony and memorial narratives, and the literature of resistance and rebellion.

At Columbia University, I run the Alliance Program, an academic joint venture of Columbia University and three major French Higher Education Institutions: École Polytechnique, Sciences Po, and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Alliance builds academic collaboration through the creation of dual degrees, visiting professorships, joint research, and doctoral mobility programs.

I was previously Director of the British Council in New York, where I oversaw the creation of partnerships with US foundations to launch initiatives connecting higher education institutions across the Atlantic. Before joining the British Council, I was Senior Adviser at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. I also held senior positions at the Commonwealth Secretariat and at the Quebec Delegation in London, where I was in charge of academic relations programs. A native of Montreal, I studied politics and philosophy at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and earned a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. I am the author of four novels.

Selected publications 

Non-fiction

- “Narrative Anxiety: An Examination of Fractured Memory Through the Lens of Contemporary Francophone Literature” by Emmanuel Kattan and Karen Struve, in Struve, Karen, Michael I. Schapira, Ulrich Hoinkes, and John P. Allegrante. Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024

- “Il vient quelqu’un. Notes pour entrer dans Le terrier de Kafka”, Novendécaméron, dir. Chantal Ringuet et Jean-François Vallée, Montréal, Ramures, 2023

- Il dovere della memoria, Ipermedium Libri, 2003 (Italian translation of Penser le devoir de mémoire)

- Entretiens: Naïm Kattan, Boréal, 2017 (Interviews on multiculturalism)

- Penser le devoir de mémoire, Presses Universitaires de France, 2002

Fiction

- L’attrapeur d’âmes, Leméac, 2019 (novel)

- Paths of Desire, trans. Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo, Exile Editions, 2014 (English translation of Les lignes de désir)

- Le portrait de la reine, Boréal, 2013 (novel)

- Les lignes de désir, Boréal, 2012 (novel)

- Nous seuls, Boréal, 2008 (novel)