Michel S. LarondeAssociate Professor
email Michel Laronde
563 Phillips Hall
335-2264
Michel Laronde is Associate Professor of French. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 20th-century literature and now works in three areas of Francophone studies, Quebec, North-Africa and immigration. His main area of teaching and research is post-colonial literatures and cinema from France. Autour du roman beur. Immigration et identité (1993) is a seminal book on the presentation of beur fiction in the 1980s. L'Ecriture décentrée, a volume of essays he edited in 1996, follows the evolution of Arabo-French fiction and of the critical thought that frames the domain. In 2003, he edited a collection of articles on Leïla Sebbar's fiction. It includes a presentation of the author's work and a complete bio-bibliography. In the spring of 2002, and as part of his course on Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures in France, Leïla Sebbar gave a two-week seminar on her recent novels.
He has articles published in CELFAN, Etudes francophones, Expressions aghrébines, French Literature Series, French Review, Le Maghreb littéraire, Nottingham French Studies, Présence francophone, Vives Lettres and as chapters in several books. He is on the editorial board of Le Maghreb littéraire. He has delivered papers at the Conseil International d'Etudes Francophones on three continents and organized and chaired more than a dozen sessions on post-colonial literatures. The May 2003 session at the Twentieth-Century French Colloquium, "Les Littératures de la post-colonialité en France : Entre roman et cinéma," presented the latest developments in Arabo-French and Afro-French cultures. He is finishing a book on the manipulation of literary stereotypes learned in French schools in the fiction of immigration and their function as a critique of French culture. Recent presentations are preliminary work for a book on self-representation by post-colonial authors.
Michel Laronde regularly teaches "Quebecois literature", a course on the culture, literature and cinema of Quebec, "Post-colonial literature in France" as an introduction, an advanced course or a graduate seminar. He also teaches Translation and Comparative Stylistics. He has worked with students and colleagues in France and other francophone countries. Several graduate students in the department are working with him on North-African, West-African, and immigration literatures.
Copyright © 2003 The University of Iowa. All rights reserved. Contact: french-italian@uiowa.edu - Updated 7/29/08