Jennifer Carr

Jennifer Carr’s research examines how contemporary authors have used experimental writing to challenge normative notions of gender and sexuality. Her current book project identifies feminist appropriations of constrained writing techniques in works by Sophie Calle, Anne Garréta, and Chloé Delaume, among others, showing how these authors have used formal and procedural constraints to critique social constraints that shape gender and sexual identity. In so doing, her monograph project also attends to how transnational feminist and queer thought manifests in formally innovative literature.

Her writing on contemporary authors and filmmakers including Calle, Garréta, Annie Ernaux, and Alice Diop has appeared in the journals Essays in French Literature and Culture, The French Review, and Women in French Studies, among other venues. Her latest article project reads Lamia Ziadé’s Mon port de Beyrouth (2021), an illustrated account of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, through a decolonial ecocritical lens.

Professor Carr has taught French & Francophone Studies across the curriculum, from introductory language courses to graduate seminars on literature and film. Prior to joining the faculty at Connecticut College, she taught at Yale University, the University of Alabama, and Wellesley College.