Overview
Nasanin Rosado is a sixth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Romance Studies department, French and Francophone track, at Duke University.
She is currently working on her dissertation project, entitled "Monstrous Mothers: The Womb as Grammar in the Francophone Black Atlantic," and is expected to graduate in Spring 2024 with certificates in African and African-American Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminism Studies; and College Teaching.
Taking cue from Renée Larrier, who argues that “[francophone women writers] subvert silenced history... in fictional narratives,” her thesis proposes to read key texts of African diasporic literature in order to flesh out the subtleties and significances of the mother-made-murderer, and in doing so, argue that literature provides the code to “de-biologize the epistème” as per Sylvia Wynter. This thesis will argue that the refusal to maternity witnessed in the works of Marie-Célie Agnant, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Évelyne Trouillot represents a material refusal that is a necropolitical act of resistance to antiblack weather in the wake of the Middle Passage.Rosado graduated from New York University in 2019 with a M.A. in French Studies, awarded with distinction; in 2018 with a M.A. in Comparative Literature; and in 2017 with a B.A. in French and Comparative Literature, magna cum laude and with honors. In the pursuit of these degrees, she completed the following theses: “The Polemic of Frantz Fanon and the Problem of Universalism” (2019); “Poetics, Parole, and Performative: Language and Resistance in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest” (2018); and “La Décolonisation par les mots: Négritude comme une appropriation poétique noire de la langue française,“ for which she was awarded the Prix Jindrich Zezula, presented for best honors thesis in French (2017).