Annabel Kim

Annabel Kim

Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (French)
Undergraduate Advisor for French
B.A., Williams College; Ph.D., Yale University
Annabel Kim

Research Interests: 20th- and 21st-century French Literature; Feminism; Contemporary Novel; Literature and Politics. 

 

I received a B.A. in French and Art History from Williams College in 2007 and a Ph.D in French from Yale University in 2014.

I am interested in feminist writing and theory, the novel (in particular, the contemporary novel), and, more broadly, the ethical and political implications of writing and reading fiction. While I specialize in 20th- and 21st-century French literature, I have a soft spot for literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, despite the myriad ways it has of killing off its women.

My first book, Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (Ohio State University Press, 2018), uses the collective corpus of Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta to theorize a feminist poetics that hollows out difference and reworks our subjectivities so that we can break free of identity and exist as subjectivities without subjecthood. My second book, Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), works to combat the deodorization of the French literary imaginary and argues that the persistent excrementality of the modern French canon puts forth fecality as a corporeal, concrete corrective to abstract universalism as a site of exclusion and violence. My current book project, Ought to Fiction, is a critique of contemporary French literature's domination by autofiction and exofiction and its unquenchable thirst for the real.

 

Fall 2023 Office Hours: In-person office hours: Mondays 3-4 pm, Wednesdays 1–2 pm
Zoom office hours: Tuesdays 10-11:20 am, Thursdays 2–3 pm, https://harvard.zoom.us/j/7086489847

Schedule online at https://annabelkim.youcanbook.me

 

 

Contact Information

Boylston Hall 427
p: (617) 496-0486
Office Hours: Spring 2023 Office Hours: In-person office hours: Mondays 3-4 pm, Wednesdays 11am–12pm / Zoom office hours: Tuesdays 9am-11am, Thursdays 1–3 pm, https://harvard.zoom.us/j/7086489847 Book Via https://annabelkim.youcanbook.me

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