Research Areas

20th and 21st century French and Francophone literatures; multilingualism; migration and diaspora; intersections with Armenian and Arabic literatures; trauma; queer theory; care

Biography

I am a second-year student in the French Ph.D. program with research interests concentrated in the 20th and 21st centuries. I'm currently thinking about the relationship between language and landscape (and love!) in the work of Monique Wittig. My work has primarily focused on the French poetic and Armenian prosaic oeuvre of Armen Lubin, an Armenian genocide survivor who escaped to Paris in the interwar period. In his work I’ve been interested in questions of multilingualism, exile, and the articulation of collective and historical traumas. My thesis for a maîtrise (M1) in Armenian literature from the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales focused on Armenian-French code-switching and “langue minorée” in his 1929 novel Նահանջը առանց Երգի [La retraite sans fanfare]. Before that, I completed my BA in French and Linguistics here at UC Berkeley, where I wrote a thesis on the self-reflexivity of Lubin’s poetry and the ways in which it houses trauma.

Previously, I’ve spent time in Paris working as an assistante de langue through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF), as well as teaching English and French at the university level in Armenia. Outside of my studies, I enjoy hiking, cooking, and blasting French feminist podcasts!