Amina Zarzi

I am an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). At Somerville College, I teach French Language, Translation, Orals and Essay.

I have been teaching French ‘language cafés’ and French ‘research-based language tutorials’ at the University of Birmingham since 2020. I have also been an English academic language tutor at AWAS (Academic Writing Advisory Service) for the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham since 2021. 

Research

My research interests revolve around colonial and postcolonial encounters between France and North Africa and the literary productions that emanate from these encounters. My PhD in French and Francophone Studies reads Algerian identity from the prism of the Sahara. It posits the Sahara Desert as an accurate analytical prism through which we can understand complex paradigms related to cultural identities in Algeria, and North Africa in general. I am interested in researching how colonial encounters in spaces like the Sahara shape and make visible, but also invisible different memories, histories and identities. More broadly, I am interested in 20^th and 21^st-century French and Algerian literatures, and I am currently researching the imprint of imperial legacies on postcolonial societies and how the latter resist but also perpetuate the colonial tropes in literary writing.