Safoi Babana-Hampton

Biography

Safoi Babana-Hampton is Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University.  Her primary areas of teaching and research are 20th and 21st century French and Francophone literatures, film and cultural studies.  Her book Réflexions littéraires sur l’espace public  marocain dans l’oeuvre d’Abdellatif Laâbi (Summa Publications, 2008) critically examines the role of culture in the construction of civic consciousness and the formation of a modern public space in Morocco. She also authored articles on a wide range of topics relating to conceptions of multicultural citizenship, the postcolonial condition, historical memory in a global context, interfaith relations, expressions of identity by French cultural minorities, and artistic hybridity in the literary and film productions of French cultural minorities, Moroccan Sephardic literature and other Francophone literary and filmic narratives from North Africa and Québec.  She is a former Fulbright fellow and a two-time recipient and Senior Principal Investigator of the UIUC Humanities Without Walls award, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, for the transnational collaborative documentary features Hmong Memory at the Crossroads (2015) and Growing up Hmong at the Crossroads (2017).

Degree:  Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park

Research Interests: Francophone postcolonial studies; transnational and diasporic studies in the French-speaking world; film studies; theories of narrative, representation and interart dialogue in their relationship with questions of gender, class, race, cultural and historical memory