Valerie Orlando Awarded NEH Summer Stipend

The Professor of French and Francophone Literatures and Cultures embarks on a project exploring the portrayal of Algiers in contemporary Algerian literature.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Valerie Orlando, professor and head of French in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer stipend to support her research and writing for a book on the themes of history and memory in contemporary Algerian literature.

As a researcher on a wide variety of subjects in the areas of literary studies, women’s studies, African cinema, and French and francophone studies, Orlando focuses mainly on Africa and the Caribbean and has published extensively—in French and English—about Algeria. The former French colony gained independence in 1962 at the end of the Algerian War. Arabic became the official national language of Algeria in 1990, though millions of Algerians still read and write in French. 

Orlando’s latest project will delve into French-language work by modern fiction authors residing in Algiers—such as Samir Toumi, Kaouther Adimi, Amina Mekhali, Chérif Arbouz and Lynda Chouiten, among others—related to memory, identity and historical consciousness. She will explore their perspectives on the postcolonial experience and the legacy of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, a brutal, decade-long armed struggle between the Algerian government and various Islamist groups.

The NEH grant will provide Orlando the time and resources to conduct author interviews in Algiers as well as research at institutions such as the National Archives in Algiers and the Archives d’Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. The culmination of the project will be a comprehensive study that bridges the realms of literature, history and cultural studies, providing insights into the construction of memory and identity in contemporary Algerian society. It will be among the first studies concentrating on contemporary authors “who have little presence in the francophone canon of Algerian writing.” 

The project is a sequel to Orlando’s 2017 book, “The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950 – 1979,” which explored the expansion of Algerian writing in French from the 1950s to 1979.