about me

I am a literary scholar who writes and teaches across linguistic and disciplinary borders. Since 2016, I have been an assistant professor in the Department of French at Yale University, where I am also a member of the Councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies. My scholarship has been shaped by research in Algeria, but my interest in questions of state violence, translation, and justice have led me to investigate aesthetic and intellectual networks across the African Sahara. My publications and research collaborations contribute to multiple fields: francophone, North African, and postcolonial literary studies and theory; histories of violence, decolonization, migration, and cultural memory; film and sound studies; and the environmental humanities.

My first book, Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony was published by Duke University Press in June 2021. This book charts a new itinerary for comparative literary studies and for studies of testimony, cultural memory, and decolonization in and beyond French. You can hear me speak about the book here and here.

During a residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France in 2019, I began to draft a new book, called Signs in the Desert : An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara. In this book, I draw from the insights of spatial theory, critical cartography, and forensic architecture to build a case for how contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara transform the reductive and dangerous ways in which this desert has long been mapped—an activity that I define as ‘aesthetic cartography.’

This work has pushed me to rethink disciplinary boundaries, so I have created the research collective Desert Futures : Sahara | Sonora, along with my colleagues Brahim El Guabli (Williams College) and Francisco Robles (Notre Dame). This collaboration brings together scholars and artists to contribute to different fora and publications over the next several years, including the ‘Desert Futures’ workshop and public symposium that I organized at Yale in April 2022. Together, we are working to create new pathways for interdisciplinary humanities scholarship through sustained, comparative focus on the poetics and politics of two of the most contested and militarized border zones on earth, the Sahara and Sonoran. You can hear me talk about the collective in this interview feature by the Yale Whitney Humanities Center.

here is my CV

contact me

jill.jarvis@yale.edu

Yale University Department of French
Humanities Quadrangle
320 York Street, 3rd Floor
New Haven, CT 06511