Soraya Limare

Scholar, France - USA

Soraya Limare is a Franco-American doctoral student and instructor in the Department of French at Columbia University. She was born in Toronto and grew up in Martinique and Paris. Prior to starting her PhD at Columbia, she taught French in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She studied humanities at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and holds BA and MA degrees in French and Comparative Literature from Paris 4 Sorbonne University. Her PhD dissertation focuses on literary representations of the Haitian Revolution in the 20th century. Soraya also enjoys singing, dancing and watercolor painting.

Artist: Patricia Brintle

Fictions of the haitian Revolution

Limare’s dissertation, which she will work on during her Camargo residency, is a transnational and interdisciplinary study of literary representations of the Haitian Revolution, focusing on 20th century (from 1791 to 1804) works and on the literary dimensions of seminal historical studies such as those by C.L.R. James. It also foregrounds questions of gender. Women have often been marginalized in Haitian revolutionary studies, which have focused on the male leaders such as Toussaint Louverture. She considers how women’s participation is depicted in works by female authors such as Marie Chauvet and Maryse Condé. She also highlights the multilingual and cross-regional landscape of fictions of the Haitian Revolution along with the dynamics of translation.