Modernity Unmoored: Ships as Material and Metaphor

Maria Truglio is a Professor of Italian and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Penn State (University Park). She earned her BA from Wesleyan University in 1992, and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from Yale University. Her research investigates Italian literature from the nineteenth century to the present day with attention to questions of gender and national identity formation. She is currently focusing on the field of children’s literature, bringing psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and postcolonial methodologies to bear on texts written for young people from the unification period forward.

Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François is an Assistant Professor of French & Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature, whose scholarship and teaching interests draw from a variety of fields such as postcolonial and decolonial theories, migration studies, island and ocean studies, and Creole and ethnic studies. His first monograph, Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones contemporains (Brill, 2017), is a comparative study that foregrounds the notion of ‘rupture’ as a relational framework for theorizing the aesthetic and ethical responses which twenty-first century francophone writers across the Global South offer to the global culture of violence, and to the endless stream of violent imagery that have become both mundane and myopic in our contemporary society.

Victoria Boyd-Jennings is currently pursuing a dual PhD in French and Francophone Studies and African Studies at Penn State University. Her research interests include Francophone diasporic identity formation and the collective memory of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonialism through the examination of precolonial historiographies and colonial archival documents.