Arwa Reda (she/her), PhD (Graduated)

Ethics, testimony, and the detective genre; Memory and trauma studies; Holocaust studies
Arwa Reda (she/her), PhD Candidate

Joined the program in Fall 2017 and graduated in Fall 2024.

Graduate minor in English

Research Description: 

My research broadly focuses on the investigative narrative as a privileged form for working through memories of traumatic events in the history of individuals, their descendants, and their communities. My dissertation, "The Consequential Investigative Narrative: On the Literary Excavation of Traumatic Memory," interrogates how some French detective or detective-based novels and graphic novels deal with the investigation of one’s memories in relation to familial and communal traumatic memories of the Holocaust (and tangentially the Algerian War of Independence). 

The works I study serve as models that showcase the elasticity of the detective genre as it assumes the role of an interface for events to be re-examined and more fully revealed. As such, the genre opens the gates to learn more about inexpressible lived trauma, its transmitted history and transgenerational effects, as well as its ethical implications both as pertinent to the individual and to the collective body to which he or she belongs, such as Holocaust survivors or colonized Algerians. 

Investigation is also a mode of transmitting the history to the readers and elucidating the lived experiences of events, thereby precluding forgetfulness or omission from public consciousness. As such, it gives the readers the active role of participating mentally and emotionally in the narrative world, thereby, prompting them to wrestle with issues of accountability, justice, and ethical exigences in relation to History as it happened and as it unfolds in the here and now. 

 «Les enjeux spatio-temporels de la mémoire cadenassée dans Un Secret (2004) de Philippe Grimbert. » Francosphères, vol. 11, no. 2, 7 Dec. 2022, pp. 167–186., https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2022.14.  

“Reading Antelme with Levinas: Recreational Activities in Concentration Camps.” 20th & 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, Apr. 2020, https://doi.org/10.32873/unl.dc.ffsc.08.

 

“‘[À] la recherche de la main manquante’: Assessing Responsibility in Thierry Jonquet’s Les orpailleurs [The Gold Diggers] (1993)” British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies Online Conference. May 22, 2023.

“Anne Gorouben’s 100, boulevard du Montparnasse: Investigation Through Enactment” Northeast Modern Language Association 55th Annual Convention. March 23, 2023.

“From Push(land) to Pull(land): Clandestine Migrants as Displaced Nonentities in Mahi Binebine's Cannibales” 39th Annual 20th & 21st-Century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium. March 26, 2022.

“Lives, Afterlives, and Invocation from the Dead in Anne Berest’s La Carte postale (2021)” 20th & 21st Century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium, Feb 24, 2024.

Hella Mears Fellowship in German and European Studies (Summer 2023)

Teaching Assistant (Reader/Grader) – University of Minnesota, Fall 2024 (CSCL 1001W: Introduction to Cultural Studies)

“Navigating the Highs and Lows of PhD Candidate Life” Panel Moderator and Panelist. University of Minnesota, Department of French and Italian, FRIT Lab. (October 2024).

Visiting Instructor at Macalester College (Spring 2024)

Graduate instructor in the French and Italian Department at the University of Minnesota (Fall2018 -Spring 2023).

Editor for Arabic, translation reviewer, Open Global Rights. The Ford Foundation, the Humphrey School for Public Affairs, and the Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota (2018-2020)

Conference Co-organizer : Graduate Conference- Spectral Spaces: Exploring Spatiality & the Engagement of Form- Departments of French and Italian and German, Nordic, Slavic, & Dutch, University of Minnesota (March 2022)

Vice-President of: Association of Graduate Students-Department of French and Italian, University of Minnesota (2021-2022)

French Graduates representative at: Council of Graduate Students-Department of French and Italian, University of Minnesota (2020-2021)

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