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Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry(link is external), and currently holds the Zaffaroni Family Chair of Undergraduate Education. She is the Faculty Advisor for Undergraduate Studies (2025-2026). Affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute of European Studies, her teaching and research interests span 19th -21st-century French and Francophone literature, memory studies, aesthetics and bio/necropolitics, critical human rights and refugee studies. She is a recipient of the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (2012) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022). She is currently co-PI of a Mellon grant on A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times (2024-2027).
Books published and forthcoming: Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe's Edges (Fordham, 2025); Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), translated into French as Mémoire et Complicité: Au Prisme de la Shoah (PUV, 2019); and The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006).
She has guest-edited “Time and Politics in Contemporary Critique: Entanglements and Aftermaths” (Critical Times, 2018). She has also co-edited, with Éric Fassin, Demos Anxiety: Genealogies, Rhetorics, and Politics of Great Replacement (forthcoming in Patterns of Prejudice); with Damon Young and Mario Telò, Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler (Representations 2022), and, with Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman, Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies 118-119).
Selected Publications
Books:
Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe's Edges (in progress)
Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham University Press, 2015).
Translated into French as Mémoire et Complicité: au prisme de la Shoah (PUV, 2019) by Camille Perton with a preface by Éric Fassin.
The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Journal Issues:
Co-editor, with Mario Telò and Damon Young, of Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler (Representations, 158/1, 2022): https://online.ucpress.edu/representations/issue/158/1
Guest Editor and contributor, Time and Politics in Contemporary Critique: Entanglements and Aftermaths (Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, 2:3, 2019): https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times (open access).
Special Editor with Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman, Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies 118/119, 2010).
Recent articles:
"Race, Migration and Security at the Euro-African Border," Theory & Event, vol. 24 no. 1, 2021, p. 324-355. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/780776.
“The Gender of Testimony: Ruth Elias and the Challenge to Lanzmann's Paradigm of Witnessing" in The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and its Outtakes (Wayne State, 2020)
Introduction to Time and Politics in Contemporary Critique: Entanglements and Aftermaths (Critical Times, 2:3, 2019):https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article/2/3/347/149391/Introduction
“Humanitarian Detention and Figures of Persistence at the Border,” (Critical Times, 2:3, 2019): https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article/2/3/435/149397/Humanitarian-Detention-and-Figures-of-Persistence (open access).
“Calais’s ‘Jungle’: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance” (Representations, 139, 2017): https://online.ucpress.edu/representations/article/139/1/1/81676/Calais-s-Jungle-Refugees-Biopolitics-and-the-Arts
“The City as Heterotopia: Sylvain George’s Paris est une fête “(La Furia Umana no.31, 2017): http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/64-archive/lfu-31/679-debarati-sanyal-the-city-as-heterotopia-sylvain-george-s-paris-est-une-fete
“A Tour through Baudelaire’s Fight Clubs,” in Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, 2017)
“Modiano’s Memoryscapes” (Public Books, October 2015): https://www.publicbooks.org/modianos-memoryscapes/
Recent Blog Posts:
"The Social Contract and the Game of Monopoly: Listening to Kimberly Jones on Black Lives" (6/29/20): https://ctjournal.org/2020/06/29/the-social-contract-and-the-game-of-monopoly-listening-to-kimberly-jones-on-black-lives/
"The Virus and the Plague: Albert Camus on COVID-19" (3/27/20): https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2020/03/27/the-virus-and-the-plague-albert-camus-on-covid-19/
