DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Vinay Swamy is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College, New York. He received his Ph.D. in French with a certificate in Gender Studies from Northwestern University in 2002. He also holds a Master's degree in French from Miami University, Ohio and completed his B.A. at Denison University. His teaching and research interests are located in French & Francophone literary traditions and their intersection with political & cultural histories, as well as the construction of social identities in contemporary France.He also teaches in the International Studies and Women’s Studies programs. 

Prof. Swamy regularly presents papers at national and international conferences and has published 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 articles on the PaCS debate and kinship structures in contemporary French films, on Hanif Kureishi's "My Beautiful Laundrette" and on the 2003 film "L'Esquive" by Abdellatif Kechiche have been published in Comparative Literature Studies and Studies in French Cinema. Professor Swamy was a recipient of a 2020–21 Fulbright Scholarship, where he pursued his research on nonbinary gender in France. 

Professor Swamy is the author or editor of several books. His monograph, Interpreting the Republic, on marginalization and belonging in France was published by Lexington Books. He is a co-editor of Screening Integration (University of Nebraska) which analyzes Cinema about descendents of Maghrebi migrants in France; an updated translation of this volume was published as Les Écrans de l'intégration (Presses universitaires de Vincennes).

Devenir non-binaire en français contemporain, the first volume on non-binary gender and the French language in France, was edited by Professor Swamy (with Louisa MacKenzie, University of Washington, Seattle) and published by Éditions Le Manuscrit. 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 that focuses on non-binary gender and the French language.