Alison Rice

Chair, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Education

M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

 

Research and Teaching Interests

autobiographical texts, postcolonial studies, film studies, peace studies, migrant literature, translation theory, contemporary women's writing, music in literature, "Francophonie" in a large sense

Biography

Professor Rice specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Francophone literature. Her first book, Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lexington Books 2006), closely examines the work of Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, and Abdelkébir Khatibi. Her second book, Polygraphies: Francophone Women Writing Algeria (University of Virginia Press, 2012), focuses on autobiographical writings by seven prominent Francophone women writers from Algeria. She is the editor of a recent volume titled Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music (Liverpool University Press, 2021) that explores a wide range of innovations in Francophone film, literature, theater, and art. Her third book, Worldwide Women Writers in Paris: Francophone Metronomes (Oxford University Press, 2021), constitutes an in-depth examination of the present proliferation of women writers of French from around the world.

Prior to becoming Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Alison Rice was Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame. She is a Concurrent Faculty member in Gender Studies and a Faculty Fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame.

Representative Publications

“Francophonies.” Femmes et littérature: Une histoire culturelle, II. Ed. Martine Reid (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2020): 473-533.

“Worldwide Women Writers and the Web: Diversity and Digital Pedagogy.” Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women. Eds. E. Nicole Meyer and Joyce Johnston (New York and London: Routledge, 2019): 27-34.

"Tangled Tongues: Teasing Out Multiple Meanings in Translation.” MLA Volume on Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar. Ed. Anne Donadey (New York: Modern Language Association, 2017): 150-156.

“All Over the Place: Global Women Writers and the Maghreb.” French Global: A New Approach to Literary History. Eds. Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010): 160-76.

“Julia Kristeva: An Interview on Forgiveness with Alison Rice.” Introduction, Transcription of Interview, English Translation. Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), Volume 117, number 2 (March 2002): 278-95.