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.
Publications
Articles and Chapters
“Somewhere in America: Rock, Hip-Hop, and Racial Capitalism in Laurent Chalumeau’s Fuck.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Forthcoming.
“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. 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.