
Olivia C. Harrison
Associate Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature
Olivia C. Harrison’s research focuses on postcolonial North African, Middle Eastern, and French literature, film, and theory, with a particular emphasis on aesthetic and political affiliations between writers and intellectuals from the Global South. Her first book, Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2016), analyzes the representation of Palestine in Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian literary works and public debates from the 1960s to the present. She is currently working on two book projects. Her second book project, Indigenous Critique: French Anti-Racism and the Question of Palestine, charts the emergence of the Palestinian question in France, from the anti-racist movements of the late 1960s to contemporary art and activism. Her third book project, tentatively titled The White Minority, analyzes the recuperation of anti-racism (including the Palestinian question) by the French alt right. Coeditor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2016), Olivia C. Harrison has translated essays and poems by Abdelkebir Khatibi, Abraham Serfaty, and Abdellatif Laâbi.
Keywords: Maghreb; Palestine; Beur and banlieue literature and film; decolonization; transcolonial studies; global south studies; racism and anti-racism; translation
Courses: “Translating Race”; “Colonial Subjects”; “France and Islam”; “Third World Documents”; “The Abrahamic”