Adlai Murdoch

Adlai Murdoch

Professor of French and Francophone Studies

437 Burrowes Building University Park, PA 16802 Office hours: 1:00–3:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays or by appointment.

akm7188@psu.edu

Fields

Postcolonial Theory; Caribbean Cultural Theory; Francophone Caribbean Novel; Migration and Diaspora Studies; Narrative Theory; Autobiographical Theory; Caribbean Culture and Cinema

Education

PhD, French Literature, Cornell University

MA, French Literature, Howard University

BA, University of the West Indies

Professional Bio

Adlai Murdoch is a scholar and specialist of the Francophone Caribbean. His first book, Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel (2001), explored the treatment of the paradoxes and ambiguities of departmentalization in Guadeloupe and Martinique through the narrative patterns of select novels of the region. His second monograph, Creolizing the Metropole: Migratory Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film (2012), is a comparative study of postwar migration and the struggle for a diasporic Caribbean identity in the European capitals of London and Paris.

Professor Murdoch is the editor of The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories: Neoliberalism Since the French Antillean Uprisings of 2009 (Rutgers University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of the essay collections Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies (University Press of Florida, 2005), Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity (Cambridge Studies Press, 2013), and Metropolitan Mosaics and Melting-Pots-Paris and Montreal in Francophone Literatures (Cambridge Studies Press, 2013). He has also co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures entitled "Migrations and Métissages," a special double issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies entitled "Oceanic Dialogues: From the Black Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific," a special issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies entitled "Oceanic Routes: Migrations and Métissages in South Pacific Literatures and Travelogues,” and a special three-volume issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies entitled “Departmentalization at Sixty: The French DOMs and the Paradoxes of the Periphery.” Most recently, he edited a special commemorative issue of Research in African Literatures entitled “Aimé Césaire, 1913-2008: Poet, Politician, Cultural Statesman,” and co-edited a special issue of the C.L.R. James Journal with Justin Izzo, entitled, "The Postcolonial Aesthetics of René Ménil,"

He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Seizing Diasporic Subjectivity in the Black French Caribbean, 1791-2021: From the Haitian Revolution to the Lyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon, focusing on uprisings grounded in resistance and revolution and seeking liberation and agency in the Francophone Caribbean.