Dr Karel Plaiche
MA PhD La Réunion
Research interests: African Francophone Literatures ; Francophone African critical thinking; Theories of fiction, theories of the novel; Sociocriticism; Literary anthropology; Post-colonialism Studies; Trauma and postcolonial trauma studies; Feminist criticism; Geo criticism, Ecocriticism
Dr Karel Plaiche teaches French and Francophones Literatures, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory and Criticism, Argumentative and Rhetorical Strategies, French as a Foreign Language and is also interested in Didactics of Literature. She is a Research Fellow at the Laboratoire de recherche sur les espaces créoles et francophones (LCF EA 4556) at the Université de La Réunion (France) where she lectured in French and Comparative Literatures and did her Ph.D which focused on contemporary Sub-Saharan African francophone literatures.
To-date, her research deals with post-colonial and contemporary sub-Saharan African societies whose cultural imaginary is shaped by violent events in the complex socio-historical and political contexts since independence. She questions the relationship between literature and society; History and fiction; (traumatic) pain and language through concepts of testimony, healing, pathos, ethos, etc., within literary framework and favours a multidisciplinary perspective drawing on discourse analysis, history, anthropology, sociology, psychiatry, philosophy, and aesthetics.
Office: Beattie Room 206