Education
PhD, French Literature, Thought and Culture, New York University
MA, Philosophy, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
MSc, Comparative Literature, University of Edinburgh
BA, French and English Language and Literature, Université Aix-Marseille
Biography
Kaliane Ung was born in Paris and grew up in Martinique.
Her manuscript Wounded Writings: Disability in France focuses on first-person accounts of disability across literary genres. It argues that writing is a tool for survival when illness and suffering alter subjectivity, mapping the territory of an altered bodymind, that she conceptualizes as “the wound.” It claims that in modern France, the wound becomes a site of enunciation as well as a site of transformation through the performative act of writing the ailing self. It defines performativity as the way in which the text transforms the body and invents new patterns of resilience and plasticity after the disabling event. The book is structured around four “situated experiences” of disability (the war wound, mental illness, neurodivergence, skin disorders) that articulate first-hand experience and the search for community.
Aspects of this project are derived from the collective digital humanities project undertaken in her health humanities courses “Ailing Bodies: Narratives of Health and Illness” and “Plagues and Pandemics: Public Health in the Francophone World.”
Every Fall, she is offering a mixed-level Health Humanities Research Lab.
In 2022, she co-edited a special issue of Simone de Beauvoir Studies on “Situating Masculinities” with Dr. Todd Reeser.
In 2025, she is co-editing a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur on “Future Worlds of Health” with Dr. Benjamin Dalton and Dr. Benjamin Gagnon-Chainey.
She likes gardening, practicing aerial arts and watching TV with her cats.
Selected Fellowships
American Council of Learned Societies ACLS Fellowship, 2024
Pitt Momentum Funds Arts and Humanities Microgrant, 2023
Princeton University Library Research Fellowship, 2020
Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship, 2018
Selected Peer-reviewed articles
"Animalité et entre-soi dans La héronnière et L'habitude des bêtes de Lise Tremblay." Voix plurielles 21.2 (2024).
“Audrée Wilhelmy : aux confins de l’animalité, au-delà des tabous.” Women in French special issue 9 (2024)
“Écrire le handicap des enfants : Clara Dupont-Monod, Minh Tran Huy, Hélène Cixous.”Tangence 133 (2023)
“L’étrange animalité de Linda Lê dans Autres jeux avec le feu” L’Esprit créateur 63.4 (2023)
“Violette Leduc’s feminist flâneries.” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 46.1 (2022)
“Joë Bousquet, crip exemplaire ? Poétique et éthique de la blessure de guerre.” L’Esprit créateur 61.4 (2021)
“Mon désir fou de cinéma: Jean Marais et Isabelle Adjani sous la plume de Violette Leduc et Hervé Guibert.” Sens public (2021)
“Les viols de Violette dans Trésors à prendre et La Chasse à l’amour.” Violette Leduc: Genèse d’une oeuvre censurée (2019)
“Méditer selon Joë Bousquet.” Sites: Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 22.2 (2018)
Selected Short Fiction
"Rongeur à gyrophares" Selfies: Autoportraits d'enfants du siècle, Le cheval d'août. (2023)
“Baby Shower” MuseMedusa 11 (2023)
“Monarque” Moebius 160 (2019)
“Stigmates” Moebius 157 (2018)
Undergraduate Courses
FR80 - The Modern French Novel
FR88 - Ailing Bodies: Narratives of Health and Illness (cross-listed with GSWS, included in the Health Humanities Certificate and the Certificate in Disability Studies)
FR0221 - Reading French: Literature, Media, Culture
FR1022 - Creative Writing Workshop in French
FR1023 - Theatre Workshop in French
FR1025 - The Idea of France
FR1074 - Plagues and Pandemics: Public Health in the Francophone World
FR1902 - Health Humanities Research Lab (one credit course)
Graduate Seminars
FR2703 - Animality, Sex, Gender (cross-listed with GSWS)
FR2715 - Transatlantic Dialogues: French & American Feminisms (cross-listed with GSWS)
FR2715 - Corporealities/Textualities
FR2715 - Bodies, Illness, and Philosophy
FR2795 - French Oral Skills for Graduate Studies (one credit course)