Valérie LoichotSamuel Candler Dobbs Professor of French; Department Chair

Ph.D. in French, Louisiana State University, 1996

Valérie Loichot, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of French and Chair, Department of French and Italian; core member of Comparative Literature; (Ph.D. in French, Louisiana State University, 1996). Literature, theory, and aesthetics of the Americas (Caribbean, U.S. South); Decolonial Studies; Ecocriticism; Édouard Glissant

An award-winning writer, teacher, and mentor, Loichot is the author of three books: Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literatures of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (University of Virginia Press, 2007), The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2013; winner of MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for best book in French and Francophone Studies, 2015); and Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2020). She also directed a special issue of La Revue des Sciences humaines in honor of her mentor Édouard Glissant (Entours d’Édouard Glissant, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013).

In addition, Loichot has published over forty articles and book chapters on Caribbean literature and culture, the US Gulf South, hurricanes and climate change, rituals of passing, creolization theory, feminism and exile, contemporary art, food studies, and the Algerian War of Independence in venues including Callaloo, Études francophones, French Cultural Studies, The French Review, The International Journal of Francophone Studies, the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Mississippi Quarterly, Small Axe, Southern Spaces, the Presses Universitaires des Antilles, and Cambridge University Press. She is currently working on two books: “Écritures de la terre” examines what Caribbean art and literature can teach the world as we combat climate change; “Fiction pour archive” rethinks decolonial historiographies of the Algerian War of Independence through fiction, film, pop music, autofiction, and memoir. She is a founding member of the Tout-Monde Art Foundation: https://www.tout-monde-foundation.org

Loichot is also a winner of the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award and of the Eleanor Main Graduate Mentor Award.