Claudine Raynaud

Claudine Raynaud holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1992) and a doctorate from the University Paul Valéry, Montpellier (1987). She has taught at the University of Birmingham, the University of Liverpool, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University and Oberlin College. A Professor of English and American Literature at the University François-Rabelais in Tours, she now heads the nationwide African American Studies Research Group created in 2004. She is the author of Toni Morrison: L’Esthétique de la survie (1997) and has co-edited with Geneviève Fabre Beloved, she is Mine, Essais sur Beloved de Toni Morrison (Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1993). A Hurston scholar, she focuses on the inscription of race and sexual difference in self-writing and has published essays on Lorde, Angelou, Brooks, Wideman and Langston Hughes in relation to autobiography. She also works intermittently in conjunction with the ITEM-CNRS (Paris). Her most current publications are “The Poetry of Abjection in Morrison’s Beloved” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, (Maria Diedrich and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Carl Petersen Eds. Oxford University Press, 1999) and more recently, “Coming of Age in the African American Novel,” chapter 6 in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, 2004, and “Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory” in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, 2006, both from Cambridge University Press.