Vinay Swamy

Vinay Swamy received his doctorate in French Studies with a certificate in Gender Studies from Northwestern University. He also holds a Master’s degree in French from Miami University, Ohio and completed his BA at Denison University. His teaching and research interests are located in French and Francophone literary traditions and their intersection with political and cultural histories, as well as the construction of social identities in contemporary France. Professor Swamy also teaches in the International Studies and Women’s Studies programs.

He regularly presents papers, invited lectures and has served as keynote speaker at various national and international venues and has published articles on postcolonial Francophone works by Azouz Begag, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Maryse Condé and YB, which have appeared in various journals including Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and Yale French Studies. His essays on the PaCS debate and kinship structures in contemporary French films, on the 2003 film L’Esquive by Abdellatif Kechiche as well as on Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette have been published in Studies in French Cinema and Comparative Literature Studies.

Professor Swamy is the author or editor of several books. His monograph, Interpreting the Republic, on marginalization and belonging in France was published in 2011 by Lexington Books. He is editor (with Sylvie Durmelat, Georgetown University) of Screening Integration (U of Nebraska, 2011) which analyzes Cinema about descendents of Maghrebi migrants in France; an updated translation of this volume was published in 2015 as Les Écrans de l'intégration (Presses universitaires de Vincennes). In 2016, Professor Swamy’s book-length translation of Marcela Iacub’s work on the history of public modesty was published by Manchester University Press as Through the Keyhole.

Devenir non-binaire en français contemporain, edited by Professor Swamy (with Louisa MacKenzie, University of Washington, Seattle)—and the first volume on non-binary gender and the French language in France—was published by Éditions Le Manuscrit in 2022. Professor Swamy also collaborated with Louisa MacKenzie to publish “Legitimizing ‘iel’? Language and Trans communities in Francophone and Anglophone Spaces,”  a special online issue of H-France Salon, (Volume 11, issue 14) that focuses on non-binary gender and the French language. 

For more information on select publications, please click on this link.

Vinay Swamy has served as Chair of the Department of French and Francophone Studies (2014–15, 2016–18), and as the Resident Director of the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris (2011–12, 2015–16 and 2019–20). 

While on leave in 2021–22, Professor Swamy pursued his research on nonbinary gender as a Fulbright Research Scholar in France.