Debarati Sanyal

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French and Director of the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research (CIR). She grew up in France and received her BA in English and Modern Languages from Oxford. She came to the United States for a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton and held a junior faculty position at Yale before joining the Berkeley French Department in 2000. She received the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014, and was a Guggenheim Fellow (2021-2022). She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender, and European Studies. Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; aesthetics and biopolitics;  postwar French and Francophone culture; transcultural memory studies. Debarati's first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaims Baudelaire's aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique; her second book, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), addresses the transnational deployment of complicity in the aftermath of the Shoah. Her most recent book, Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at the Edges of Europe (forthcoming with Fordham in 2025) addresses migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe's current refugee "crisis, and was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022). She currently serves as a co-PI (with Judith Butler, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Shannon Jackson) on a Mellon grant for A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times.