Aparna Nayak, Ph.D.

Aparna Nayak, Ph.D.

RGRLL Department Chair

Professor of French

California State University, Long Beach

1250 Bellflower Blvd. Long Beach, CA 90840

Aparna.Nayak@csulb.edu | Office: AS-314

 

Research Interests

Dr. Nayak’s main area of interest is France in World War II, and the inter-relations between literature, memory, history, and politics. Her work on immediate post-war writings engages with questions of remembrance and forgetting. She is also interested in the immediate pre-war period, specifically the cultural politics of the Popular Front government.

Education

2006 University of Pittsburgh, Ph.D., French

1998 Université de Paris VII-Denis Diderot, D.E.A, French literature

1993 University of Pittsburgh, M.A., French

1989 University of Bombay, B.A., French

Publications:

Peer-reviewed articles

  • (with J. Tatro) “Gender Fluidity, the Crisis of Care, and Eco-criticism in George Sand’s François le champi.” In: Martin, C.E., Donato, C. (eds). The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan (2024), p. 535-548. . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40494-8_29
  • “Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Punition, or the (re)presentation of incarceration as lived experience” in International Journal of Francophone Studies.Volume 23, Numbers 1-2, 1 July 2020, pp. 31-47.
  • “From Essay to Novel: Echoes of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Hospitalité française(1983) in Le Mariage de plaisir (2016).” Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) Special Issue on the Maghreb: Beyond the Francophone Maghreb. Fall 2020, vol. 14 issue 3, pp. 420-434.
  • “Le droit d’étaler ses blessures”: Survival and Testimony in Guy Kohen’s Retour d’Auschwitz” in The French Review, vol. 93 no. 2. pp. 147-158 (2019).
  • “De rive en rive: exile, space, and memory in Nancy Huston’s L’empreinte de l’ange” in Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness and Exile. Eds. Pamela Pears and Valerie Orlando. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 81-93.
  • “Les Nuits de Strasbourg d’Assia Djebar: la ville et les espaces historiques croisés.” in Les Espaces intimes féminins dans la littérature maghrébine d’expression française. Eds. Robert Elbaz (University of Haifa) and Françoise Saquer-Sabin (University of Lille-3). Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014. pp. 245-256.
  • “Ambiguous identities: myth and self-reinvention in Un héros très discret.” The French Review, vol. 86.4 (2013), pp. 32-42.
  • “Aux armes, citoyens!” The role of French newspapers in the call to insurrection and unity, June – October 1944.” Francopolyphonies, 10.2 (December 2012), pp. 195-204.
  • “Wir sind doch keinen Barbaren”: Music, Musicality and Cultural Politics in Aragon’s ‘Le droit romain n’est plus’,” French Forum. Fall 2009. Vol. 34, no. 3. pp. 21-38.
  • “The project of Liberation and the projection of national identity. France, literature and politics, 1944-1945” in Sites / Contemporary French & Francophone Studies. “French Studies Today”. Vol. 10. no. 2. Spring-Summer 2006, pp. 195-204.

Other

  • “Editors’ Introduction” as guest editor, SITES Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Eds. Roger Celestin and Eliane Dalmolin. Vol. 17.4 (2013), pp. 373-377.
  • Bibliographic consultant for a critical volume on Louis Aragon’s work by LP Publishers, Fall 2013.
  • “DJ Zaïfe: Remix de la cité du paradis: interview avec Faïza Guène, écrivaine”. Laura Ceia-Minjares, written in collaboration with Aparna Nayak-Guercio. Contemporary French & Francophone Studies. Vol. 11. no. 1, January 2007, pp. 93-97.

Teaching

  • Lower-division : French language
  • Upper-division : French grammar & composition, French conversation, French phonetics, Business French, French Syntax & Composition, French literature survey, 19th and 20th century French literature, Self & Society, Research Methods & Critical Theory, Contemporary European Society (with study abroad).

Links

Full Curriculum Vitae