Julie Nack Ngue, Ph.D.
Research Scholar since 2008
julienackngue@gmail.com

Julie Nack Ngue received her PhD in French and Francophone Studies from UCLA in 2007 and Maitrise in Lettres modernes from Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal in 2001. She is currently a Lecturer in French at USC, as well as a CSW Research Scholar. Her research focuses on representations of illness and disability in Francophone African and Caribbean literature and cinema.

Nack Ngue is a recipient of the UCLA Chancellor's Fellowship, 2002-2007, as well as a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2006-2007. She served as Associate Fellow in the UCLA Global Fellows program from 2006-2007. She also received a 2006 Travel Grant from CSW and a 2005 Summer Research Mentorship (under Françoise Lionnet) and in 2005, was given the UCLA Robert Merrill Award for Best Teaching Assistant in the Department of French and Francophone Studies. 

Her current research represents a series of articles organized around the general theme (drawn from her dissertation) of illness and disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Writing. These analyses are less a "diagnosis" of female protagonists in Francophone writings than a readjustment of the frame of analysis for such transnational, migrant postcolonial writers as Ken Bugul and Maryse Conde. Her research takes account not only of the systems of race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also those of embodiment and health by introducing disability as a category of analysis. Disability reveals material inequalities while simultaneously allowing for visions of illness and disability that dwell outside the constitutive paradigms of cure and normative bodily and psychic health.

Complementary research projects: The legacy of colonial medicine and science in contemporary France and recent Francophone immigrant narratives (Bessora; Diome) and questions of belonging, citizenship, and health; Cinematic and literary narratives of disability and the nation in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean (Danticat; Sembène; Sow Fall; Mambety).

"Grotesque Bodies, Circulation, and Haunting in contemporary Senegalese Women's Writing: Towards a New Aesthetics of the Global," in Migrant sub-Saharan Literature. Eds. Papa Samba Diop and Subha Xavier. Dominique Gueniot: Paris. Forthcoming 2008.

"The Body of Survival, the Body Composite: Testimony and the Problematics of Integral Healing in Ken Bugul's Le Baobab fou," in Emergent Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices, Jeanne-Sarah de Larquier and Ada Uzoamaka Azodo, eds. Lawrenceville, N J: Africa World Press. Forthcoming 2008.

"Ken Bugul." Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora. Eds. Carole Boyce Davies & Babacar Mbow. Miami: African New World Studies. Forthcoming 2008.

"Colonial Discourses of Disability and Normalization in Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Narratives: Bessora's 53 cm and Fatou Diome's Le Ventre de l'Atlantique," in "Intersecting Gender and Disability Perspectives in Rethinking Postcolonial Identities," Spec. issue of Wagadu, Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies 4 (Summer 2007). Ed. Pushpa N. Parekh. Print edition forthcoming. View article

"Des ténèbres à la lumière," Interview with Senegalese novelist Fama Diagne Sène. Mots Pluriels 20 (Feb 2002). View article