Madeleine Dobie
Research Interests
Francophone/postcolonial literature; colonial history; 18th-century culture
I'm a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society and Co-director of Columbia’s Amman-Tunis Middle-East/North Africa summer program, an intensive Arabic language course combined with a cultural and historical seminar.
Teaching and Research
My teaching and research areas include francophone/postcolonial literatures and cinemas of France, the Maghreb, the Middle East and the Caribbean as well as the cultural dimensions of migration and diaspora. I also teach and write about eighteenth-century French culture, particularly with regard to orientalism, colonialism and the history of slavery.
Current Book Projects
I am working on a book about testimony given long after a violent or traumatic event. Specifically, I explore belated accounts of the Algerian Revolution written by combatants and militants. The book explores how changing transnational social and political conditions frame how writers view and depict their past, as well as the dynamics of memory and ageing. I consider writing by both well-known writers and historical actors and more obscure participants in this emblematic war of decolonization. The book includes chapters on the role of gender and on children writing in the name of a parent. There is also a chapter on how Frantz Fanon has been remembered by colleagues and friends, decades after his untimely death and one devoted to Albert Camus’s unfinished autobiographical novel, first published 30 years after the writer’s death.
My second current book project is about literature, cinema and other forms of artistic expression in contemporary Algeria. It charts the establishment, since the end of the ‘Black Decade’ of the 1990s, of new publishing ventures and arts venues and the emergence of new literary voices and forms. It draws connections between this cultural renaissance and aesthetic currents that explore the politics of space. In conjunction with this project, I have developed, in conjunction with the Center for Spatial Research, a hybrid course with traditional and digital components on space, urban conflict and cartography in North Africa.
I am also a co-editor A Comparative Literary History of Slavery and the editor of Vol. 1: Slavery, Literature & the Emotions, which was published in January 2025 by John Benjamins under the auspices of the ICLA’s Comparative Literary Histories in European Languages book series. This three-volume project explores representations of slavery across genres, media, historical periods and regional and linguistic contexts with emphasis on affect (volume 1), memory (volume 2) and authorship and print culture (volume 3).
Current Grants
In May 2025 I will collaborate with the Fondazione 1563 in Turin on an interdisciplinary project focusing on enslavement in the eighteenth century. This collaboration is supported by the US Fulbright Program.