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 examines twenty-first-century French literature as a site of radical political imagination. Through close readings of works by a diverse set of novelists and poets – including Yannick Haenel, Virginie Despentes, and Jean-Marie Gleize – his project reveals a countercurrent of twenty-first-century French literature grounded in a shared imaginary of alternative communal life and radical Leftist politics that are autonomous from the French state, capitalism, governance, and traditional political structures. Overall, his book project questions the narrow political frameworks through which twenty-first-century French literature continues to be read and demonstrates how radical politics appear in unexpected ways in a period of literature sometimes reduced to the reactionary or the apolitical.
Dr. Pettman is also an active translator whose work focuses on Francophone literatures and cultures. 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. His articles and book reviews appear or are forthcoming in French Forum, Nottingham French Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, French Studies Bulletin, Modern Language Quarterly, and Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, and an entry in the Dictionnaire Assia Djebar, edited by Maya Boutaghou & Anne Donadey (Paris: Honoré Champion). His translations have appeared in Yale French Studies and in the edited volume Hip Hop en français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).