Dawn Fulton

Dawn Fulton teaches and writes on contemporary literature and film from the Caribbean, West Africa, North Africa, and metropolitan France. Her first book, Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism, examines Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé’s response to the fields of postcolonial theory and criticism in her fiction, and received an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in French and Francophone Studies. More recent publications focus on colonial history in contemporary migration narratives of Paris, with articles on the works of such writers as Fabienne Kanor, Rokhaya Diallo, Lauren Ekué, Jean-Roger Essomba, and Alain Mabanckou. Her forthcoming book, Elsewhere in the City: The Urban Poetics of Caribbean Women’s Migration, is a study of urbanism in Caribbean women’s literature from the 1960s to the present.

Fulton’s translations from French to English include short stories by Gisèle Pineau, Leïla Sebbar, and Marie-Célie Agnant. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for the translation of the 1961 novel Cajou by Michèle Lacrosil, and is currently completing a translation of Marie-Célie Agnant’s collected stories, Nouvelles d’ici, d’ailleurs, et de là-bas (2017).

Fulton teaches French language at all levels along with courses on food and memory in French Caribbean literature, on urbanism and education in Francophone cinema, and on literature of the Chinese diaspora in France. In the World Literatures program, Fulton offers courses on translation and bilingualism in postcolonial literature. She received the Rally Day teaching award from the Student Government Association in 2011. Since 2021, she has been directing a student research lab on antiracist activism in France.

Recent Publications

"Urban Iconographies: Gender, Hair, and Afro-Parisian Consumerism," Radical History Review 144 (2022): 131-151.

"Planet Condé: Writing Our Times, Writing the Anthropocene," Yale French Studies 140 (2022): 87-102.

Silence Like Blood, by Marie-Célie Agnant. Working Titles 5.1 (March 2020).

Afterword. The Belle Créole, by Maryse Condé. Translated by Nicole Simek. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

"Paris Noir au féminin: Fabienne Kanor's DOM-TOM Histories," Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 23.3 (2019): 298-306.

"Unknown Knowns: Michael Haneke's Caché and the Failure of Allegory," The Modern Language Review 114.4 (October 2019): 682-699.