Ninon VessierPhD CandidateFrench

Ninon Vessier is a 6th year student and a Dean’s Teaching Fellow in the Department of French & Italian. She holds a BA in French literature and English and a Master’s in American literature. Before coming to Emory, she was a Fulbright grantee at the University of Maine.

Her research interests include North African and Sub-Saharan literature and visual art, environmental humanities, and decolonial studies. Her dissertation, Ecological disruption: Reading the African Environment with Collage Art, explores how the environment retaliates against anthropogenic violence through a methodology devised from the composite design of African collage art to challenge understandings of the environment as a passive victim of exploitation. Following collages’ disruptive work on our homogeneous perception of matter, her dissertation dismantles anthropocentric hierarchies between human and non-human in search of vibrant ecological disruptions that shatter colonial, post-industrial visions of African environments.

She published an article that reads Assia Djebar's l'Amour, la Fantasia through the prism of geological memory in Expressions Maghrébines and an article that focuses on petroleum agency in the play Je, soussigné cardiaqueby Sony Labou Tansi in Études Littéraires Africaines. She also co-translated this play, forthcoming in 2024. 

Thanks to a Mellon grant, she is currently conducting a digital Public Humanities oriented project entitled "Voicing Mediterranean Ecologies" that gathers recorded testimonies of NGOs and associations that strive to protect the environment in Southern France, Northern Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. This project raises awareness vulnerable ecosystems in the region, but also provides an online space where activists and organizations can access actions in the Mediterranean and can connect between one another in a trans-national way. She is also the recipient of the Laney Graduate School Fellowship. 

Education 

Fulbright Teaching Assistant at the University of Maine 

M.A Mondes Anglophones, Université de Strasbourg, France.

Hypokhâgne - Khâgne, Strasbourg, France.