Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François

Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François is an Assistant Professor of French & Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature, whose scholarship and teaching interests draw from a variety of fields such as postcolonial and decolonial theories, migration studies, island and ocean studies, and Creole and ethnic studies. His first monograph, Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones contemporains (Brill, 2017), is a comparative study that foregrounds the notion of ‘rupture’ as a relational framework for theorizing the aesthetic and ethical responses which twenty-first century francophone writers across the Global South offer to the global culture of violence, and to the endless stream of violent imagery that have become both mundane and myopic in our contemporary society. Since he joined Penn State in 2015, Jean-François has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on subjects ranging broadly from Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and African literatures; to human rights discourse and creolization; Francophonie and World Literature. A literary humanist, trained in cultural studies, comparative francophonies and ‘minor transnationalisms,’ he has recently co-edited an issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, titled “Mapping Francophone Postcolonial Theory” (2018) and a volume from Cultural Dynamics on “The Minor in Question” (2020). Jean-François is currently writing his second monograph, Indian Ocean Creolization: Empires and Insular Cultures, which focuses on the literatures and expressive cultures of the Mascarene Islands.