Dr Diane M. Otosaka

Profile

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Holocaust Literature at the University of Leeds, where I completed my PhD in French studies in 2022 with recognition of Research Excellence.

My thesis examined a corpus of texts by French and Francophone writers published from 1997 to 2018 that deal with questions of memorialisation of the Holocaust for those who come after this traumatic event. It argued that, to understand the place of the Holocaust in contemporary French and Francophone writing, it is critical to go beyond the binary opposition between distance and proximity that sees them as mutually exclusive. This in turn generates new ways of understanding the rich body of works produced by postmemorial writers, especially as it relates to four key aspects that cut across generational and genre boundaries: the rejection of chronological time in favour of non-linear time, the emphasis on the connective nature of memory, a reflection on the political and poetic dynamics of the archive, and the articulation of a link between spectrality and justice. It was funded by a WRoCAH Network Studentship.

I have taught on modules relating to French critical theory, contemporary French history and politics, and world literature at Leeds. In 2022–2023, I was Associate Lecturer and French Language Assistant at Sheffield Hallam University where I taught all levels of French language. 

Publications

Edited volume

• Dreams and Atrocity: The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023).

Article

• ‘Drancy–La Muette: Concentrationary Urbanism and Psychogeographical Memory in Alexandre Lacroix’s La Muette (2017)’, Genealogy 2023, 7(1), 23

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, 2023), 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, 2023), 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, 2023), 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, 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 Organisation

• November 2021: Co-organiser Conference ‘Space in Holocaust Memory and Representation’, Institute of Humanities, University of Northumbria, online  
• September 2019: Co-organiser Symposium ‘Dreams and Atrocity’, Sheffield Humanities Research Institute

Digital Humanities Project

• 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’.
  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

My research interests include: contemporary French and Francophone literature; critical theory; memory studies; trauma studies; Holocaust studies; representations of extreme violence; the oneiric; postcolonial studies

Qualifications

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