Françoise Lionnet is a professor at UCLA in Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Gender Studies, as well as the current director of the African Studies Center and Program Co-Director of UCLA's Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities: Cultures in Transnational Perspective. She is a leading scholar in Francophone and comparative literary studies, and has published groundbreaking work in the fields of feminist literature, postcolonial studies, autobiography, and African, African-American, Caribbean and Mascarene Island studies. She is the former president of the American Comparative Literature Association.http://www.complit.ucla.edu/people/faculty/flionnet/