Valérie LoichotSamuel Candler Dobbs Chair of French and EnglishChair, Department of French and ItalianFaculty, Comparative Literature
Biography
Valérie Loichot, Chair, Department of French and Italian. Professor of French and English; core member of Comparative Literature; (Ph.D. in French, Louisiana State University, 1996). Francophone and Anglophone literature, culture, theory, and aesthetics of the Americas (Greater Caribbean, U.S. South); Édouard Glissant
An award-winning teacher and writer, Loichot is the author of three books: Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literatures of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (University of Virginia Press, 2007), The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2013; winner of MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for best book in French and Francophone Studies, 2015); and Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2020). She also directed a special issue of La Revue des Sciences humaines in honor of her mentor Édouard Glissant (Entours d’Édouard Glissant, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013).
In addition, Loichot has published over thirty articles and book chapters on Caribbean literature and culture, the US Gulf South, hurricanes and climate change, rituals of passing, creolization theory, feminism and exile, contemporary art, and food studies in venues including Callaloo, Études francophones, French Cultural Studies, The French Review, The International Journal of Francophone Studies, the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Mississippi Quarterly, Small Axe, Southern Spaces, the Presses Universitaires des Antilles, and Cambridge University Press. Her current book project investigates drawings, animals, and philosophy in Glissant’s manuscripts. She also begins to explore the cross-pollination of figures of ghosts, revenants, and zombies in early twentieth-century literature and ethnography of Haiti and Suisse romande.
Professor Loichot was a Visiting Professor at the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier and at the Dartmouth Institute of French Cultural Studies. She is a recipient of the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Education
- Licence, Université de Franche-Comté, France
- Maîtrise, Université de Franche-Comté, France
- Ph.D., Louisiana State University