Sylvie
Laurent
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Fall 2009
Title / Appointment: 
Senior Lecturer
Location: 
Sciences-po

Contact Information

Address: 
104 Mount Auburn Street, 3R, Cambridge MA 02138
Telephone: 
617.496.0592
E-Mail: 
slaurent@fas.harvard.edu

Biography Information

Sylvie Laurent received her Ph.D. in American Studies in 2007 at La Sorbonne University in Paris. She has been teaching History in High school since she earned her Agrégation in 1998 and, since 2006, she is 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.

Project Description

White Like She, Cross-Over Narratives of Doubling: Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, A Comparative Study

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.