Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune

Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune

Professor Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures at California Lutheran University. She received her Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University in 2014. Her research and teaching focus on (post)colonial history, visual culture, memory and trauma studies.

In her book manuscript, France’s Ghosts: Haunting Memories of Slavery in Public Metropolitan Monuments, she unveils the various social, political and aesthetic dynamics at stake in the memorialization of slavery through the analysis of 20th-21st century monuments in French cityscapes. Anchored in public art, collective memory, and oral history, her work examines how these commemorative practices mediate or even highjack a prescribed official history in an attempt to answer demands for official recognition, symbolic reparation, and equal representation in multicultural public spaces.

Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune