Alice Duhan
Associate Senior Lecturer
Department of Languages and LiteraturesAbout Alice Duhan
I joined the University of Gothenburg in 2025 as Associate Senior Lecturer in French. Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at Stockholm University (2022–2024), where I also completed my PhD in French in 2021. I hold an MA in French and German from the University of Edinburgh.
My research interests include literary multilingualism, self-translation, world literature theory, and contemporary French and Francophone fiction.
I am editor-in-chief of Recherche littéraire/Literary Research, the bilingual journal of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA).
Current research:
- Translingual Writing in French
A major strand of my research focuses on literary translingualism, examining the works of authors past and present who have composed literary texts in a second (third, fourth...) language. My current project, "Translingual Writing post-1945 and the Multilingual Spaces of French Fiction" (Swedish Research Council, 2025-2027) focuses on translingual fiction in French from 1945 onwards, a period when translingual writers not only came to play a particularly prominent role within French-language literature, but also increasingly came to be viewed – and often to perceive themselves – as belonging to a specific “translingual” literary tradition. The study asks how this literature can contribute to a re-reading of recent French literary history from the vantage point of multilingualism.
As an extension of the project, I am organising the conference Worlding Francophone/graph: Literary and Artistic Modes of (Non)belonging (with colleagues Shuangyi Li and Cajsa Zerhouni), 8-9th June 2026, University of Gothenburg.
- Multilingualism in Swedish Literary History
The forthcoming edited volume Francographie au féminin: les écrivaines suédoises de langue française (Classiques Garnier 2026, co-edited with Mickaëlle Cedergren) explores how Swedish women writers have used French in their literary work from the seventeenth century to the present, examining how the functions, meanings, and motivations associated with writing in French have evolved over time. By framing these writing practices in terms of Franco-Swedish translingualism, the book situates them within a broader reassessment of historical multilingualism from the perspective of transnational and transcultural cartographies of world literature.
- Multilingual Creativity and Genetic (Self-)Translation Studies
I’m also interested in the creative processes of multilingual writers, especially those who self-translate their work prior to publication, and have been conducting archival work at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) as part of a collaborative project on multilingual women writers and translators. I am an affiliated researcher within the Franco-Nordic network “Écrire et traduire au féminin” (a collaboration between the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM), CNRS, the Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions at the University of Oslo, and Stockholm University).
- World Literature Studies
My interest in world literature theory began during my doctoral studies, when I participated in the research programme Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2016-2021), a large-scale collaboration involving over 25 researchers from six Swedish universities. More recently, I co-edited the book Literature and the Work of Universality (2024, De Gruyter), together with Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg and Paul Tenngart. The volume aims to intervene in debates for and against the validity of world perspectives on literature, whilst also considering how literary texts themselves may contribute to articulating renewed forms of human commonality.
With my colleague Anna Forné, I recently obtained seed funding to establish a network “World Literature from the (Semi-)Periphery” within the interuniversity alliance EUTOPIA, and I am the convenor of a seminar series on the topic.
Teaching:
I teach courses in French language, literature, and culture at undergraduate and master’s level. My teaching has covered a broad range of topics, including contemporary and nineteenth-century French literature, Francophone North African literature, Québécois literature, cultural studies, and French grammar and phonetics.