Contact Information
Biography Information
Sylvie Laurent received her Ph.D. in American Studies in 2007 at La Sorbonne University in Paris. She taught history in public High school after her agregation in 1998 and, since 2006, she has been an assistant professor at Sciences-Po in Paris where she teaches various seminars on African-American history and culture. She published many articles relating to contemporary American popular culture and published her first book Homérique Amérique in September 2008. She was a visiting fellow at Harvard in 2005-2006 on a Fulbright Scholarship at the African and African-American Department. She is currently at work on her Ph.D. dissertation’s publication.
Since 2010, she is a lecturer at Columbia University Programs in Paris. Her second book, based on her PhD dissertation will be published at the Sorbonne university Press in Fall 2011.
Project Description
My project stems from my Ph .D dissertation, “From the poor white to the poor white trash in the American Novel from 1920” and seeks to come to grips with the literary process which enabled two major African-American novelists, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, to give their voice to poor white degraded characters, specifically women, while intertwining class, gender and race.