Ramla Bédoui

Ramla Bédoui is a Lector in the Department of French. She was previously Visiting Assistant Professor in French at Connecticut College. She took her PhD summa cum laude in French Literature at Université de Paris-Sorbonne Paris-IV where she also earned two Master’s Degrees including one in the History and Philology of the Arab World. She was born in Tunisia, where she completed her secondary education in Arabic and French.

 Bédoui pursues research stemming from her PhD on the construction of individual and collective memory within the works of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.

 Currently, she is completing a monograph about the longstanding conflict in North Africa between secularists, feminists, and minorities on the one hand and fundamentalists on the other, as it has been influenced by French and Arabic-language political, philosophical, and literary traditions, showing how that struggle has been encoded within the collective memory of post-colonial literature and visual arts. She further analyzes how this conflict plays out within France’s immigrant milieu. 

Her most recent publications are “The Obscure Nuptials of Reading in Mallarmé and the Marchalian Intervention” in Une Transparence du regard adéquat, Paris, Hermann, 2023 and “Decolonizing Baudelaire, Mediating Poetry in the Arab World”, Yale French Studies, (forthcoming). 

Bédoui is further exploring the recent generational transition in North Africa from a French-language intellectual foundation to the use of theories coming from the English-speaking Left, due to the waning of theory in France. She also explores the influence of Artificial Intelligence on pedagogy and language classes and on how AI can improve the access of scholars from the Global South to Western knowledge production.