Dr. André Pettman holds a Ph.D. in French from Columbia University (2024). He also holds an M.A. in French (2017) and B.A. degrees in French and Psychology (2016) from the University of Arizona. A specialist of contemporary French & Francophone literature, his research interests include critical theory, politics, film studies, and translation. His current book project, Communal Dispossession: Precarity and Community in Contemporary French Literature, reveals how contemporary French authors —Virginie Despentes, Yannick Haenel, Philippe Vasset, Jean-Marie Gleize, Éric Vuillard, and Alain Damasio—have reimagined our relationship to precarity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a time when precarity is an inescapable structural force and the defining feature of 21st-century life. Connecting literary analysis with critical theory, Communal Dispossession demonstrates how contemporary French literature transforms precarity into a condition of radical collective possibility and a means of being in common with those most embattled by neoliberalism’s violent impositions: the unhoused, the undocumented, the socially invisible, and even the earth itself.
Dr. Pettman is also an active translator and interpreter. He has co-translated, with Soraya Limare, Assia Djebar’s inaugural speech at l’Académie Française and is currently writing a critical introduction to accompany its publication. He is also the contributing editor for the “French Critical Theory” subsection of The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies.
Publications
Articles and Chapters
“Somewhere in America: Rock, Hip-Hop, and Racial Capitalism in Laurent Chalumeau’s Fuck.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2026.2698302.
“Académies,” co-written with Soraya Limare, entry in Dictionnaire Assia Djebar, Eds. Maya Boutaghou & Anne Donadey (Paris: Honoré Champion). Forthcoming.
“Revolution, melancholy, and the limits of constituent power: François Cusset’s À l’abri du déclin du monde.” Modern & Contemporary France 34, no. 3, 2026, pp. 367-381. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2025.2549019.
“When Waters Rise and Birds No Longer Sing: L’Absence d’oiseaux d’eau by Emmanuelle Salasc.” The French Review 99, no. 3, 2026, pp. 89-102. https://doi.org/10.1353/tfr.2026.a984104.
“Communal Conjuration: The Politics of Disappearance in Philippe Vasset’s La Conjuration.” French Studies Bulletin 46, no. 1, 2025, pp. 6-11. https://doi.org/10.3828/fsb.2025.46.1.2.
“Vivre Sans: Deserting Capitalism, Governance, and Identity in Les Renards pâles by Yannick Haenel.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 28, no. 5, 2024, pp. 795-810. https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2024.2427482.
“The Impossibility of Logging Off: Technological Disconnection in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s La Clé USB.” Nottingham French Studies 63, no. 2, 2024, pp. 235-246. https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2024.0415.
“Get Hard or Die Trying: Impotence and the Displacement of the White Male in Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine.” French Forum 46, no. 1, 2021, pp. 37-51. https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2021.0002.
Translations
Dorlin, Elsa. “Me, You, Us: I, Tituba and the Ontology of the Trace.” Yale French Studies 140, 2022, pp. 74-86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45456290.
Bazin, Hugues. “The Body Politic of Hip-Hop Dance.” Hip Hop en français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, pp. 123-135.
Jacono, Jean-Marie. “Rap Music in Cities in Crisis: The Case of Marseille.” Hip Hop en français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, pp. 17-28.
Book Reviews
“Review of Morgane Cadieu’s On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature. The University of Chicago Press, 2024.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 49, no. 1, 2025. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2310.
“Review of Olivia C. Harrison’s Natives Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France. University of Minnesota Press, 2023.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 48, no. 1, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2295.
“Review of Annabel L. Kim’s Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature.” Modern Language Quarterly 85, no. 3, 2024, pp. 351-353. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11414847.