Dr. Anne-Gaëlle Saliot
Associate professor of romance studies
Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Romance Studies with a secondary appointment in Art, Art History and Visual Studies, and the director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke. A French native, she was first educated in France at the Lycée Henri IV (Paris) and the Sorbonne, before receiving her DPhil. from Oxford University in the U.K. She then went on to lead an academic career in French Studies in the U.S. She previously taught at the University of York (UK) and the Johns Hopkins University before coming to Duke.
Professor Saliot’s research explores translations and migrations of cultural objects across epochs, and across geographical and linguistic frontiers. Her central concern is the need to investigate the relations between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernities and their common cultural imaginary. Her work encompasses literature, theories of the visual, film studies, and dance. She is the author of a book on the famous “Unknown Woman of the Seine” (The Drowned Muse, Oxford University Press, 2015) and the co-editor of the Cahiers de la NRF dedicated to Philippe Forest. Her second book, Against the Grain. Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, and the Nineteenth Century argues that the nineteenth century serves as a sort of political unconscious discernible in most of the central tenets of French New Wave and in the ceaseless productivity of its associated filmmakers. Her most recent research focuses on the perception and reception of Japan in French theory, literature, cinema, and dance from 1945 to present, and on the emergence of “néo-japonismes.” She has publications on Maurice Blanchot (Cahiers de l’Herne), Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Maurice Pialat, Philippe Forest, Marguerite Duras, Dany Laferrière, and contemporary dance. She has created and directed several performances on literature and music for the Philharmonie de Paris, the last one being a musical homage to the literary and cinematic world of Marguerite Duras.
Her courses cover theories of the image (Benjamin, Warburg, Rancière, Deleuze), nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and visual arts, French New Wave, contemporary French cinema and literature, relations between dance and literature, and transdisciplinary Franco-Asian dialogue. She has been very involved in graduate teaching and mentoring both within and outside of Romance studies, and is advising students on a wide range of projects.
She is currently serving on the Advisory Committee of the Dance Focus Initiative of the French Embassy in the U.S. She regularly teaches for the Duke in Paris summer program.