Staff profile

I studied French and Spanish at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and subsequently completed a Masters in Cultural Memory (Institute of Modern Languages Research, London), an MPhil in European Literature and Culture and a PhD on contemporary French and francophone literature and philosophy (King’s College, Cambridge) in 2009. I have taught at the University of Oxford, Queen Mary, University of London, and predominantly at Cambridge, where I held two research fellowships and taught as a college lecturer before coming to Durham in 2018. 

My research interests lie in questions of embodiment, affect, gender, sexuality and race in 20^th- and 21^st-century French and francophone literature and philosophy. My first book, The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women's Writing in French (EUP, 2014), analyses representations of the female body in the work of four contemporary francophone authors. It explores through the critical lens of Deleuzian philosophy the contestation and transformation of the conventional boundaries of the body, and considers the implications of the notion of the ‘becoming’ of the body in the light of feminist, postcolonial and queer politics. 

I have written several articles and book chapters on contemporary French and francophone literature and philosophy, and I am the co-editor, with Professor Gill Rye, of three major books on contemporary women’s writing. 

I am currently working on two new projects, one on eating and practices of consumption, and the other on narratives of birth. The first project departs from the premise that practices of consumption are integral to the making and unmaking of our contemporary cultural worlds. In other words, the ways we interact with food – how we produce, assemble, share, and consume it – have much to tell us about communities, cultures, and the exercise of power. The project, which will lead to a monograph, aims to deepen understanding of a world in crisis by tracing connections between colonialist legacy, capitalist excess, racism, gender inequality, and ecological catastrophe at the heart of global appetite, food pathways, and patterns of eating. Focusing on the distinctive literary landscape of leading francophone Mauritian author Ananda Devi, the book will scrutinise representations of the everyday and the extreme, charting the implication of histories of the organisation of labour in sugar plantations in contemporary practices of eating and incorporation. The book -- provisionally titled Eating the Other: Ananda Devi and the Politics of Consumption -- intends to offer ways to rethink flows of consumption, from the local to the global, in a disenchanted, politically divided, and ecologically precarious world.

My second project explores the competing discourses (medical, philosophical, cultural, popular) embedded in francophone and anglophone literary representations of childbirth (autobiography, poetry, novels and short stories). I am particularly interested in the interplay of knowledge, memory and temporality in the articulation of birth, in probing the kinds of knowledges and temporalities that circulate around birth, how birth enters into knowledge and (individual, collective) memory, and how birthgivers can navigate meaningful relationships with knowledge, memory and time as they go through the transformative embodied event of birth.

I have supervised PhD students working on 20th and 21st- century French/ francophone philosophy, women's writing and visual culture, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial and decolonial writing, and world literatures, and would be happy to hear from prospective students in these areas.

• Embodiment and affect
• Feminism, gender and sexuality
• Food, practices of consumption, disorderly eating
• Race, migration, diaspora
• Postcolonial and decolonial theory
• 20th- and 21st-century French/francophone literature, philosophy and visual culture

Authored book

• Damlé, Amaleena (2014). The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women's Writing in French. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Chapter in book

• Damlé, Amaleena (2014). Introduction. In Aventures et expériences littéraires: écritures des femmes au début du vingt-et-unième siècle. Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill Rodopi-Brill. 5-18.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2014). Multiple et changeante: amour, connaissance et fragilité dans Nos baisers sont des adieux de Nina Bouraoui. In Aventures et expériences littéraires: écritures des femmes au début du vingt-et-unième siècle. Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill Rodopi-Brill. 125-141.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2013). The Mutant Metamorphic Subject: Femininity and Embodiment in Virginie Despentes' King Kong Théorie. In Experiment and Experience: Women's Writing in France 2000-2010. Rye, Gill & Damlé, Amaleena Peter Lang. 13-27.
• Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill (2013). Introduction. In Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature. Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill University of Wales Press. 3-16.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2013). The Becoming of Anorexia and Text in Amélie Nothomb's Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan's Jours sans faim. In Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature. Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill University of Wales Press. 113-126.
• Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill (2013). Conclusion. In Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature. Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill University of Wales Press. 251-252.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2011). Nomadic Trajectories: Postfeminism and Contemporary Women's Writing in French. In Parcours de femmes: Twenty Years of Women in French. Allison, Maggie & Kershaw, Angela Peter Lang. 133-150.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2011). Devenir-autre: Female Corporeality and Nomadic Transformation in Ananda Devi's Writing. In Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l'altérité. Bragard, Véronique & Ravi, Srilata L'Harmattan. 155-177.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2010). Introduction. In The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture. Damlé, Amaleena & L'Hostis, Aurélie Peter Lang. 1-19.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2009). Phantasmal Relics: Psychoanalytical and Deconstructive Ghosts in the Literature of Ananda Devi. In Anamnesia: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture. Collier, Peter, Elsner, Anna Magdalena & Smith, Olga Peter Lang. 229-240.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2009). Death and the Maiden: Murder and Eroticism in the Literature of Amélie Nothomb. In Aimer et mourir: Love, Death and Women's Lives in Texts of French Expression. Hoft-March, Eilene & Holland Sarnecki, Judith Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 98-123.

Edited book

• Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill (2014). Aventures et expériences littéraires Ecritures des femmes en France au début du vingt-et-unième siècle. Rodopi-Brill.
• Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill (2013). Experiment and Experience: Women's Writing in France 2000-2010. Studies in Contemporary Women's Writing. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien: Peter Lang.
• Damlé, Amaleena & Rye, Gill (2013). Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature. French and Francophone Studies. University of Wales Press.
• Damlé, Amaleena & L'Hostis, Aurélie (2010). The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture. Modern French Identities. Peter Lang.

Journal Article

• Damlé, Amaleena (2021). Struggling for Breath: Reflections on Respiration in Ananda Devi's Les Jours vivants. Francosphères 10(1): 143-169.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2019). Fasting, Feasting: The Resistant Strategies of (Not) Eating in Ananda Devi's Le Voile de Draupadi and Manger l'autre. International Journal of Francophone Studies 22(3-4): 179-211.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2013). 'The Wild Becoming of Childhood: Writing as Monument in Nina Bouraoui's Sauvage'. Forum for Modern Language Studies 49(2): 166-174.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2013). Towards a Poetics of Reconciliation: Humans and animals in Ananda Devi’s writing. International Journal of Francophone Studies 15(3): 497-516.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2012). Posthuman Encounters: Technology, Embodiment and Gender in Recent Feminist Thought and in the Work of Marie Darrieussecq. Comparative Critical Studies 9(3): 303-318.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2012). Truismes: The Simulation of a Pig. Dalhousie French Studies 98: 15-27.
• Damlé, Amaleena (2008). Gender Performance in the Work of Judith Butler and in Cristina Peri Rosi's La nave de los locos. Dissidences 4(2): 1-16.