Profile

Saadia El Karfi Azzarone is a seventh-year graduate student in the Department of French and Italian. Born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, Saadia graduated with a BA in French and Francophone studies from Mount Holyoke College in 2017. Her research focuses on sexuality and gender in North Africa. Her main interest is in women’s writing or l’Écriture Feminine, as well as homosexual writers in Morocco and Algeria. She is also interested in the exploration of the censored body through the figures of the woman, the homosexual, and the prostitute, which most often disturb and subvert Morocco and Algeria’s heteronormative social and political orders. In her research project she examines how women’s writing and LGBTQ writing stage the interconnections between sexuality and the “technologies of power.” Her other research interests include comics, film theory, and the relationship between disease, madness, and colonialism in Francophone literature and film.

Saadia is also passionate about pedagogy. She has taught French courses at Mount Holyoke College and Princeton, and is currently the French McGraw Graduate Teaching Fellow. Last but not least, Saadia has a University Administrative Fellowship with the Diversity and Inclusion Office of the Vice President for Campus Life.