Lou Gargouri

I am a joint PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. My work connects the study of contemporary French and Francophone literature with performance practice as research (recherche-création) and language teaching. I specialize in women’s seul·e en scène (solo performance) in contemporary France, particularly autobiographical and testimonial theater. As a playwright and stand-up comedian, I am interested in how creative practice informs literary interpretation and opens possibilities for learning French.

My dissertation, Alone, Together: Dramaturgies of Women’s Solo Performance in Contemporary France, examines how the relationship between a written text and its performance changes when one person occupies the stage. I investigate how performers negotiate narration and embodiment, and what a performing body owes the story it carries for someone else. Central to this inquiry is how the passage of testimony between bodies changes its authority and reception. I also examine how autobiographical performance unsettles the apparent correspondence between the performer and the subject of her account, particularly when different versions of a self coexist across time. These questions inform my study of the variations of monologue and the boundaries of the seul·e en scène, including its intersections with stand-up comedy. I ask how a monologue extending across an entire performance structures the spectator’s relationship to the speaker.

My research combines close reading with sustained attention to theatrical practice. Archival work on Festival OFF d’Avignon programs, alongside immersion in the festival over three consecutive years, allows me to study the relationship between the form’s growing visibility and its uneven institutional recognition. Interviews and a survey of women practitioners bring artists’ own critical perspectives into the dissertation, particularly on the tensions between creative autonomy and the material conditions of production. My scholarship also develops through my creative work, while rehearsal and performance generate questions that I bring back to my research. In my solo To a Future Self, I used live performance and digital media to stage a character at different moments of her life, exploring the body as an archive of memory and displacement.

This movement between interpretation and creation informs my student-centered teaching. I am interested in how theater can help students develop a voice in French and understand literary language through its possibilities in performance. Approaching a text as something to be spoken and addressed to another person makes interpretation a practical question: how does meaning change with an intonation or a different imagined listener? My aim is to give students room to experiment with the language while developing the confidence to make and explain their own interpretive choices. Cultural immersion is central to this approach, situating French within the varied social worlds and artistic practices in which it is spoken.

In 2024, I pursued this interest through the FestiFLE training program in Avignon, with intensive workshops in theater and language pedagogy. At the University of Chicago, I have taught elementary French and designed and taught Empowering the Solo Voice: A Feminist Exploration of Francophone Theater Performance. Across language and literature courses, I seek to make creative work a means of inquiry, allowing students’ encounters with French and Francophone cultures to inform their own writing and performance.

This exchange between research and artistic practice has developed through my immersion in different theatrical and cultural environments. My training at El Teatro in Tunis, Cours Florent in Paris, and The Second City in Chicago, alongside my experience in New York’s creative communities, including performing with the Sugar Mouse women’s collective, has shaped my interdisciplinary approach and my attention to how cultural assumptions change across places. My stand-up explores questions of privilege through the body and the experience of displacement. Drawing on contrasts between the cultures I have lived in, I examine how the same person can be perceived differently or occupy a different position of privilege from one setting to another. My broader research interests include Maghrebian theater, feminist and documentary performance, theater of the absurd, theatrical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and ecological theater.

Selected Publications and Interviews

• “Tisser l’intime et le collectif : Scénographie et transformation sociale dans Elle était une fois… LA jupe ! de Mohamed Amin Boudrika.” Interview with Mohamed Amin Boudrika. Francosphères, 2025. Read interview.
• “Quels rôles pour le spectateur à l’ère numérique ?” Review of the volume by Izabella Pluta and Julie Sermon. Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, no. 31, June 2025. Read review.
• “Le théâtre doit toujours se questionner, c’est la condition essentielle à son renouvellement.” Interview with Essia Jaïbi. Africultures, December 14, 2024. Read interview.
• “L’écriture théâtrale est un art artisanal.” Interview with Penda Diouf. Africultures, September 22, 2024. Read interview.

Work in Progress

• “Cartographier le seul·e en scène féminin : enquête sur les pratiques et enjeux d’un genre théâtral émergent en France (2015–2025).” Essays in French Literature and Culture, no. 64, special issue “En scène ! Regards sur le théâtre français et francophone contemporain.” Proposal accepted; article in preparation.
• “Tricoter au féminin : Transmission intergénérationnelle et résistance dans Gardiennes de Fanny Cabon.” Submitted to Femmes et tissage : (ré)appropriations littéraires et artistiques du XIXe siècle à nos jours, ENS Lyon.
• “Métamorphose #2 : Seul en Scène Tunisien ou les Échos de l’Identité Mouvante de Jalila Baccar.” Article in preparation for LiCArC.

Recent Courses in RLL

• FREN 10100 Beginning Elementary French I (Autumn 2021)
• FREN 10200 Beginning Elementary French II (Winter 2022)
• FREN 24724 Empowering the Solo Voice: A Feminist Exploration of Francophone Theater Performance (Autumn 2023)