Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is a US-based literary and theory scholar working at the intersection of Maghrebi literature, Mediterranean Studies, and Critical Ocean Studies. She is Associate Professor of French and Director of Middle East North African Studies at Tulane University. She is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean (Fordham University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of The Mediterranean Maghreb: Literature and Plurilingualism (Expressions maghrébines 11.2, 2012) and Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis (Palgrave “Mediterranean Perspectives” Series, 2018). She is currently at work on several projects that delve into the materiality of water as a site of alternative epistemologies and experiences of being. Among them, her book in progress, The Residual Migrant, draws on biotheory, border studies, and ecocriticism to theorize the dissolutive ontologies specific to drowned migrants whose submerged bodies are amalgamated into their ecologically ravaged, deep-sea environment. A second book-long project, a co-edited volume entitled “Water Logics,” queries the epistemological models that a focus on seawater as an analytical category can yield. Since 2015, she has served as Editor of Expressions maghrébines. She currently sits on the Advisory Committee to PMLA(2021-2024) and has served on the editorial boards of several other journals, including Yale French Studies (2009-2013). She is Secretary and incoming President of the Executive Committee of the CLCS Mediterranean Forum at the Modern Language Association (MLA). In 2016, she was named co-Vice President of the Center for Francophone Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She has lectured widely at various educational and cultural institutions in the U.S., Europe, and North Africa. In 2021-2022, she will hold visiting appointments at Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice and Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès