Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza

Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza is a professor of French language, cultures, and literatures. Her research brings together contemporary French literature and environmental activism through questions of relation, matter, community, and the human.

Biography

Brunau-Zaragoza is finishing her Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies at Brown University, where she has taught language and literature courses in French. A specialist of 20th-21st centuries metropolitan French literatures and cultures, her current research contributes to the field of environmental humanities. Her work connects multiple medias and methodologies (novels, political writings, songs, activist interviews and ethnographic research, archives) to explore representations of different modalities of being human and of envisioning the community. Her work on decomposition and vegetal creepings in the novels of contemporary writers Marie Darrieussecq and Antoine Volodine has appeared in L’Esprit Créateur and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies:SITES. She has previously taught intro to advanced courses in French language, literatures, and cultures at Michigan State University and Bucknell University, including on topics such as ecocriticism, speculative fiction, or refugee studies. As a teacher, she values immersion, cultural exploration, and experiential learning, and promotes solidarity and kindness as learning principles in her classroom.

Brunau-Zaragozais was a visiting faculty member at Bennington for Spring 2024.