Jill Jarvis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Yale University. Her research focuses on the politics of aesthetics across North Africa. Her forthcoming book, Decolonizing Memory : Algeria and the Politics of Testimony, brings together close readings of fiction with analyses of juridical, theoretical, and activist texts to illuminate both the nature of violence and the stakes of literary study in a time of unfinished decolonization. In her teaching as well as her research, she is dedicated to questioning the assumptions of area studies and methodological orthodoxies.  Her work centers the aesthetic and the literary, making the case for literature as constitutive—rather than simply reflective—of political agency.

Learn more: www.french.yale.edu

Although the Sahara covers a third of the African continent and crosses the borders of a dozen nation-states, it remains a blindspot in scholarly disciplines oriented by the colonial-era cartographies that drew those borders and the area-studies paradigms that reinvent them. The Sahara is anything but empty, and yet it has been mapped for us as a geographic, political, and symbolic dead zone. It is time to correct this. Signs in the Desert considers how contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the Sahara help to transform the reductive ways in which this desert has long been framed.

Jill Jarvis was in residence at the Camargo Foundation in 2019, as part of the Core Program.