Anne-Gaelle Saliot

Anne-Gaëlle Saliot is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, with a secondary appointment in Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and serves as Core Faculty in Cinematic Arts. Her research lies at the intersection of modern and contemporary French and Francophone literature, cinema, visual culture, performance, critical theory, gender studies, and ecocriticism. Across these fields, she examines the forms and afterlives of modernity and the circulation of images, texts, gestures, and cultural memory across media, languages, and geopolitical boundaries. Moving between the nineteenth century and the contemporary period, her work pays particular attention to the relationship between nineteenth-century modernity and twentieth- and twenty-first-century aesthetic forms. Her research interests include theories of the image, particularly the work of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and Gilles Deleuze; the French New Wave and contemporary French cinema; realism; literature and dance; and, more recently, cultural and aesthetic exchanges between France and Asia.

She is the author of The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman of the Seine Across the Tides of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2015) and the co-editor of the Cahiers de la NRF dedicated to Philippe Forest. Drawing on literary and visual archives, the book reconstructs the cultural history of the Inconnue de la Seine and traces the transformation of an anonymous death mask into a modern icon. Reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, French Studies, and The English Historical Review, it has informed scholarship across modernist studies, cultural history, visual culture, photography, cinema, performance, dance, and feminist iconography.

Her forthcoming monograph, Troubling Modernities: Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, and the Nineteenth Century, examines the nineteenth century as a political, aesthetic, and archival presence within the French New Wave. Bringing cinema into dialogue with literature, art history, philosophy, and theories of the image, the book reconsiders cinematic modernity through the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut. Her current book project, The Tokyo Syndrome: Japan in French Theory, Literature, Cinema, and Performing Arts from 1945 to the Present, explores Franco-Japanese cultural exchange, neo-Japonisme, nuclear memory, and the aesthetic and political legacies of Hiroshima and Fukushima.

Her recent scholarship extends these concerns to nuclear aesthetics and technopolitics, contemporary Francophone literature and cinema, Asian Francophonies, migration, filiation, sexual violence, and postcolonial aesthetics. Her publications and current projects engage such figures as Maurice Blanchot, Marguerite Duras, Alain Resnais, Maurice Pialat, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Philippe Forest, Linda Lê, Neige Sinno, Alice Diop, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pierre Huyghe, and Philippe Rouy.

Saliot’s scholarship also takes creative and public-facing forms. She is the creator and director of Duras Song, a performance combining chamber music and theater that premiered at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2023. Her earlier production Beethoven/Woolf was also presented at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2016. She has contributed to programs for France Culture (Une Histoire Particulière) and the podcast Criminal and has conducted public conversations with writers, filmmakers, choreographers, artists, and intellectuals.

From 2020 to 2026, Saliot directed Duke’s Center for French and Francophone Studies, one of the French Embassy’s U.S. Centres d’Excellence. During her tenure, she conceived and delivered more than seventy-five scholarly, artistic, pedagogical, and public programs; developed partnerships with over twenty-five universities, cultural organizations, government agencies, and civic institutions in the United States and internationally; and directed initiatives including the Duke French Film Festival, the Choix Goncourt seminar, North Carolina’s first Night of Ideas, and a range of transatlantic programs in literature, cinema, performance, and contemporary thought.

 Her teaching brings together literature, film, visual studies, philosophy, music, and performance. Her courses include among others: Citizen Godard, France/Asie(s), Surrealisms Across Borders, Philosophy in Motion (co-taught with Felwine Sarr), French Theory and Literature, Upcast Eyes: Realism and the Visual, Banlieues, Peripheries, and Margins in Contemporary French Literature and Cinema, Reading for the Choix Goncourt Prize. She has taught extensively in Duke’s programs in Paris and has advised undergraduate and graduate research across Romance Studies, critical theory, cinematic Arts, literature, visual studies, and related interdisciplinary fields.

 In 2025, Saliot was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government in recognition of her contributions to education, research, and French culture.