Lyna Ami AliPhD StudentFrench

Lyna Ami Ali is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. Her research focuses on French-speaking literature and film from the Caribbean (in particular Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haïti) and from North Africa (especially Algeria). Her dissertation analyzes the concept of migrant indigeneities in the works of Afro-Caribbean and North-African artists, writers and filmmakers as a mode of formation of cross-cultural solidarities during the Algerian revolution. Conceiving Algeria/El Djazaïr as an archipelago, she is interested in how the trans-archipelagic cultural expressions between North Africa and the Caribbean can reveal the ways in which the revolution has been understudied and overlooked in the very creative practices that birthed it, in its various transoceanic iterations.

Her dissertation tentatively titled “The Algerian Revolution as Archipelago: crafting Afro-Caribbean and North-African solidarities in literature, film and visual art” approaches questions of indigeneity, craftwork, silenced narratives, and gender, in the works of authors such as Frantz Fanon, Sarah Maldoror, Tahar Djaout, and Yamina Mechakra. She published her first article entitled "A Vava Inouva de Idir : Tissage et Transmission du conte (tamacahut) de la tradition kabyle" with Tamazgha Studies Journal in which she argues that unlike the traditional French-speaking literature from Algeria that archived folktales on paper, Idir’s song weaves an audiovisual transmission of Amazigh storytelling centering women’s sonic codes and visual shaping of folktales. She has presented her work in several venues such as NEMLA, SAMLA, the 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, the African Studies Association Conference, the African Literature Association conference and the Caribbean Philosophical Association conference.

She participated in the CASSI program (Critical Amazigh Studies Summer Institute) in July 2025 which helped her think further about the concept of Indigeneity reclaimed by Amazigh Moroccan activists and scholars. She also took part in the Institute of Liberal Arts Graduate Student Workshop on interdisciplinarity and the Piedmont TATTO Fellowship in Sustainability and Curriculum Development in May 2025 at Emory to fine-tune her transmediatic approach of pedagogy.

She is the recipient of the Laney Graduate School Fellowship and has received several awards for her citizenship and research in the French program at Emory.

Education 

CPGE HEC, Paris 5ème

M.A, English literature, civilization and linguistics, La Sorbonne (Paris IV)

M.A, French and Francophone literature, Miami University, Ohio

M.A, English studies, linguistics and didactics, ENS Cachan