I received my “Licence” and “Maîtrise” diplomas in French literature and a D.E.A diploma from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV).  While working on my doctorate in Comparative Literature (on American Jewish writers) at Paris IV, I came to the USA to do research on this topic.  Through some unexpected twists and turns, this sojourn in the US evolved into a Ph.D. in French Literature at Emory University, which I completed in February 2000. 

Although the core of my research is twentieth-century French literature, I have principally focused on Jewish studies and Francophone Jewish and Arab writers.  I am currently working on the repercussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Francophone world.  I am interested in how this conflict reverberates in Jewish and Arab conflict in the French suburbs of Paris, Marseille and in North Africa and how it generates semantic and ontological slippage between terms such as “Jew,” “Israelite,” “Israeli” and “Zionist” as well as “Palestinian,” “Arab,” “Islamist” and “Muslim.”

I am also interested in gender studies and French feminism, and am currently preparing a book project entailing a comparative and interdisciplinary study of the death of the father as it impacts on twentieth and twenty-first century women writers.

I have taught numerous courses on French language, literature and culture at the University of Maryland, Emory University, North Carolina State University and at Duke University.  Here at Vanderbilt I teach the following courses:

• The Jewish Writer in Post-Dreyfus France
• The Struggle of Encounter: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Literature
• Les Vicissitudes des intellectuels juifs en France (XIXème et XXème)
• “Question” d’Edmond Jabès (Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida)
• Héritage dispersé de la littérature française du XIX et XXème siècle
• Introduction to French Literature
• French Feminist Thought: Literary and Critical

In addition to twentieth century French literature, my primary research interests are:

• Jewish studies: history, religion (Zoharic tradition), the philosophy of Levinas and post-Holocaust studies   
• North African literature (Jabès, Cixous, Memmi, Kacimi, Benaïssa, Bouganim, Jacques, El-Maleh)
• Middle Eastern literature (Chedid, Sanbar, Khoury, Kattan, Kenan, Castel-Bloom, Khalifa, Badr)
• French feminism (de Beauvoir, Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, Duras, Halimi, Amara, Agacinski) 
• Literary modernity & the Dreyfus Affair (Zola, Lazare, Bernstein, Cohen, Fleg, Spire)
• Fascism & collaboration in literature (Céline’s pamphlets) 

Selected Publications

Book

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World, Ed. Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, New York: Routledge, Forthcoming.

Envisager Dieu avec Edmond Jabès, Les éditions du Cerf, Paris: June 2007.


Articles

"Symptoms of 'Anti-Racism' in France." Yale French Studies: forthcoming 2009.

“Proust et Levinas: la fatigue de la nuit.” In Lecteurs de Proust au XXème siècle, les éditions Minard, Paris: forthcoming Fall 2008. 

“L’Oeil de Dieu: Levinas lisant Jabès.” In L"Eclosion des énigmes.  Edmond Jabès hors genre, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes: 2008.