Françoise Lionnet
Françoise Lionnet is a Mauritian-born professor and scholar who works in Francophone studies, comparative literature, feminism, postcolonial studies, autobiography, and studies of the Indian Ocean, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Mascarene Islands.
She is the acting chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, where she is a professor of Romance languages and literatures, comparative literature, and African and African American studies. She is also a distinguished research professor of comparative literature and French and Francophone studies at UCLA, and a research associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She has directed UCLA’s African Studies Center and co-directed the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities: Cultures in Transnational Perspective. She is a leading scholar in Francophone and comparative literary studies and has written about feminist literature, postcolonial studies, autobiography, and African, African-American, Caribbean, and Mascarene Island studies. She is a former president of the ACLA.
Lionnet was born in Mauritius to a Franco-Mauritian and Seychellois family. She grew up speaking French and Creole and learned English at age four. She was educated in Mauritius, Réunion, France, England, Germany, and the United States. She earned her PhD from the University of Michigan and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. Before joining Harvard in 2015, she taught at UCLA (1998–2015), where she chaired the French Department (1999–2005). She also held the Pierce Miller Professorship in Literary Studies at Northwestern University until 1998 and has held visiting and special professorships at Duke University, the University of Nottingham in the UK, and the EHESS in Paris. In 2015 she was the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor at Wellesley College.
Her books include Ecriture féminines et dialogues critiques. Subjectivité, genre et ironie (2012) and Le su et l’incertain: Cosmopolitiques créoles de l’océan Indien (2012). In 2018 she published Evariste Parny: Selected Poetry and Prose, about the Creole abolitionist poet from Réunion. She has edited and co-edited volumes for journals such as Yale French Studies, Signs, L’Esprit créateur, Comparative Literary Studies, MLN, and the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and she has been a regular contributor to many scholarly journals.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:58 (CET).