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Diane Otosaka

Diane Otosaka

  • Email: mldmo@leeds.ac.uk
  • Thesis title: Between Distance and Proximity: Contemporary French and Francophone Holocaust Literature

Profile

Please note that my email address is now d.m.otosaka@leeds.ac.uk

My PhD Project, entitled 'Between Distance and Proximity: Contemporary French and Francophone Holocaust Literature' is funded by a WRoCAH Network Studentship and is supervised by Prof Max Silverman (Leeds) and Dr Daniel Lee (Sheffield). As the Holocaust inevitably recedes from living memory, this project investigates whether contemporary French and Francophone Holocaust literature could be framed in terms of distance and proximity. This project looks specifically at texts that have been written in the last two decades, and by people who do not necessarily have personal memories of this traumatic event, stressing the ambivalent nature of their writings. Underpinning this research project is a reflection on notions of time and memory.

Teaching Responsibilities

First and second year modules including those on: French politics and society, comparative literatures, and critical reading and interpretation. 

Publications

Edited volume

  • Dreams and Atrocity: The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming December 2022).

Chapters in edited volumes

  • ‘Dreams, Justice, and Spectrality in Rêver peut-être (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg’, in Dreams and Atrocity:The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming December 2022), ed. by Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka.
  • ‘Introduction: Reclaiming the Oneiric’, with Emily-Rose Baker, in Dreams and Atrocity:The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming December 2022), ed. by Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka.
  • ‘Afterword: Archiving the Oneiric’, with Emily-Rose Baker, in Dreams and Atrocity:The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming December 2022), ed. by Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka.
  • ‘Dissonances, retard et temps non-chronologique dans HHhH de Laurent Binet’, in Catching up with Time: Belatedness and Anachronies in Francophone Literature and Culture, ed. by Alice Roullière and Ashwiny Kistnareddy (Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2022), pp.103-121.
  • ‘Echoes from the Past: Architecture, Trauma, and La Cité de la Muette’, in Invisible Wounds, Post-Traumatic Landscapes, ed. by Emily-Rose Baker and Amanda Crawley (Sheffield: AKHE, 2020), pp.93-96.

Book review

  • Ivan Jablonka, History is a Contemporary Literature, Manifesto for the Social Sciences, trans. Nathan Bacher (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2018), Modern and Contemporary France, 27.2 (2019), pp.276-277.

Conference/Event Organisation

  • November 2021: Co-organiser Conference ‘Space in Holocaust Memory and Representation’, Institute of Humanities, University of Northumbria, online, http://spaceinholocaustmemory.wordpress.com/  
  • September 2019: Co-organiser Symposium ‘Dreams and Atrocity’, Sheffield Humanities Research Institute
  • May 2018: Co-organiser Conference ‘Challenging Presumptions’, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds

Selected Conference Papers

  • ASMCF Conference, University of Leeds, September 2020 – ‘Vertical and Horizontal Dynamics of Belonging in Marie Bardet’s A la droite du père’
  • ACLA, Chicago, March 2020 – ‘Spectral Justice in Jean-Claude Grumberg’s Rêver peut-être’ [cancelled due to covid-19]
  • Symposium Dreams and Atrocity, University of Sheffield, September 2019, ‘Dreams and Spectrality in Jean-Claude Grumberg’s Rêver peut-être’
  • Third Annual Memory Studies Association Conference, Complutense University of Madrid, June 2019 – ‘Contemporary French Holocaust Memory and Spectral Justice’
  • Cambridge French Graduate Conference, University of Cambridge, April 2019 – ‘Delay, Dissonance and Non-Chronological Time in Laurent Binet’s HHhH: Thinking with Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’

Other Responsibilities

  • 2018-2020: Education Outreach Fellow in French for the Educational Engagement Team at the University of Leeds (Design and delivery of workshops on French films for Year 12 and 13 students (Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine) as well as workshops to promote and inspire the study of French at university)
  • 2017-2018: Editorial board member of the WRoCAH student journal

Other Projects

  • January 2020: Short introductory text to the French author Marie Bardet https://www.occitanielivre.fr/les-auteurs-laureats-dune-bourse-de-creation-en-2019
  • September-October 2019: Research Project at Stanford University Libraries, Palo Alto – Creation of the Digital Archive ‘French Revolution Images: Iconography from the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France’. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/frenchrevolution
    This digital archive features over 5000 images of the French Revolution and is the most complete searchable digital archive of French Revolution images available. In addition to be of use to scholars for their research and teaching, this digital archive represents an important way of learning more about a foudational moment for the French nation for the public at large.

Research interests

memory studies; contemporary French and Francophone literature; trauma; 20th-century French philosophy

Qualifications

  • MSc General and Comparative Literature, The University of Edinburgh, Distinction
  • BA English, Université Rennes 2, France, First-class honours