Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Ourida Mostefai is Professor Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies. She received a Licence de Lettres from the Université de Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from New York University. She is the author of two books on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as numerous articles on the French Enlightenment. She has edited and co-edited several scholarly volumes, and most recently the critical edition of Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert for the new Complete Works of Rousseau with Garnier Classiques publishers in France. Her research interests include Enlightenment literature and philosophy, 18th-century novels and tales, the French Revolution, and pamphlets and polemics. She also teaches courses on the history of the Romance languages, on the Algerian war, and on contemporary French culture. Her project at the Cogut Institute, titled Problematizing Consent: Theories and Fictions of Resistance to Oppression in the Enlightenment, offers an examination of fictional representations of resistance to political oppression in the 18th-century novel. By exploring the contradictions of literary discourses that aim to promote political resistance and that stage the desire for freedom this study proposes to clarify the role played by fiction in the theorization of resistance to political oppression.