Michèle Bacholle, Ph.D.

Professor of French Studies

Michèle Bacholle’s first appointment was at Colby College, Maine, in 1998-99. In 1999 she came to Eastern where, as full professor of French Studies she teaches language and culture courses, as well as literature and cinema courses that are cross-listed with Women’s Studies and Film Studies. She also teaches in the First Year Program.

She set up the “French at Eastern” Facebook page:

Her main lines of research are contemporary French and Francophone women writers (more specifically Annie Ernaux and Linda Lê), multiculturalism in French children and youth literature, and the Algerian war of independence (mostly from the perspective of transmission and Memory Studies). Her latest book is on autobiographical narratives by suicide survivors Éric Fottorino, Delphine de Vigan, Philippe Grimbert, Zahia Rahmani, Olivier Charneux, and Chloé Delaume.

Her previous book, Un appelé dans la guerre d’Algérie, témoignage photo-textuel, a phototextual testimony, stems from a more recent development in her research on Annie Ernaux, i.e. the interaction of text and photographs that make Ernaux a “ph-auto-bio-grapher.”

She very regularly writes reviews for the Creative Works section of The French Review and presents at international and national conferences.

She was the 2018 recipient of the Distinguished Professor award. In 2019 she became CSU Professor.