Francoise Lionnet PhotoA past-President of the American Comparative Literature Association, Françoise Lionnet is Professor in Residence in the Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. In Fall 2015, she also holds the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Newhouse Humanities Center, Wellesley College. She is on leave from UCLA where she is a Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies. Until July 2015, she served as Director of the UCLA African Studies Center. She is a Research Associate of the Center for Indian Studies in Africa at the Univ. of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, SA. Her research focuses primarily on Indian Ocean literary, cultural, and historical studies, in relation to Atlantic and Caribbean Studies. She is interested in the longue durée of colonialism in those regions, and focuses on 18th to 21st century writers.