Alison Rice

Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Chair, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
Romance Languages and Literatures

Research Interests

Immigration Nation: Postcolonial Populations in France; Women Writers Between France and Algeria; Race, Class, and Sex in France Today

Biography

Professor Rice specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Francophone literature. Her first book, Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lexington Books 2006), closely examines the work of Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, and Abdelkébir Khatibi. Her second book, Polygraphies: Francophone Women Writing Algeria (University of Virginia Press, 2012), focuses on autobiographical writings by seven prominent Francophone women writers from Algeria. She is the editor of a forthcoming volume titled Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music (Liverpool University Press, 2021) that explores a wide range of innovations in Francophone film, literature, theater, and art. Her current book project, inspired by a series of filmed interviews she conducted in Paris, constitutes an in-depth examination of the present proliferation of women writers of French from around the world.

Prior to becoming Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Alison Rice was Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame. She is a Concurrent Faculty member in Gender Studies and a Faculty Fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame.