About

Matthew Brauer is a PhD candidate in French/Francophone Studies at Northwestern University  and a member of the Middle East and North African Studies program. He studies Maghrebi literatures in comparative contexts, especially the Mediterranean and the francophone Caribbean across the 19th and 20th centuries. His research tracks the changing ways that literature relates (or is made to relate) to politics, especially through the transformations of literature and literary theory in circulation and translation and the interactions of literary and non-literary discourses (especially in archaeology and anthropology).

His dissertation investigates the relation between literature and territory in Arabic- and French-language novels from the Maghreb. Other research interests include the periodical press, travel writing, and colonial literature in the 19th century Mediterranean.