Jill Jarvis

Jill Jarvis, Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature and Culture in Yale’s French Department, specializes in the aesthetics and politics of North Africa. Her first book, Untranslatable Justice: The Politics of Fiction in the Postcolony (Algeria 1962-2001), brings together close readings of fiction, film, and photographs with analyses of juridical, theoretical, and activist texts to illuminate both the nature of state violence and the stakes of literary study. She is also at work on a second book project, Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara, which maps the Sahara as a site of material, intellectual, and linguistic exchanges that challenge both disciplinary boundaries and received notions of African studies. In her teaching as well as her research, she is dedicated to questioning the assumptions of area studies and methodological orthodoxies.  Her work centers the aesthetic and the literary, making the case for literature as constitutive—rather than simply reflective—of political agency.

Publications

‘Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics: A Postcolonial Maghreb Without Borders,’ with Brahim El Guabli.  Introduction to co-edited special volume (double issue) of the same title.  The Journal of North African Studies.  Forthcoming Winter/Spring 2018. 

‘Inheriting Assia Djebar,’ with Anjuli Gunaratne.  PMLA 131.1 (2016), pp. 116-124.

‘Remnants of Muslims : Reading Agamben’s Silence.’  New Literary History vol. 45, no. 4 (Autumn 2014), pp. 707-728.

Courses

Introduction to Maghrebi Literatures and Cultures
La guerre d’Indépendance de l’Algérie et la littérature
French Literature in a Global Context
Postcolonial Cities
On Violence: Politics and Aesthetics Across the Maghreb (graduate seminar)
Decolonizing Memory (graduate seminar)