yeram@uchicago.edu
Subject Area:
French and Francophone Studies
Research Interests:
North African & Maghrebi Literature; Francophone Literature; Contemporary Korean Literature; Diaspora; Multilingualism; Postcolonial Theory; Translation Theory; Trauma; Amazighité.
Esther is a joint Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures (French & Francophone Studies). Her research examines how literatures—national, regional, diasporic, and "world"—are shaped through translation, diaspora, publishers, and linguistic circulation. Working across French, Modern Standard Arabic, Tunisian darija, Korean, and Tamazight literary spaces, her dissertation brings Maghrebi and Francophone Korean diasporic literatures into dialogue. She explores how multilingual authors navigate linguistic displacement to reshape identity, memory, and cultural expression—and in doing so, rethinks the very categories through which we understand these literatures and diaspora itself.
Selected Publications
- “When Morocco Meets Korea: An Interview with Ji Yong Chung on Translating Driss Chraïbi’s Le passé simple Seventy Years Later.” The Journal of North African Studies, Nov. 2025, pp. 1-9.
- “'Born-Translated': Amazigh Subalternity and the Profanation of Arabic Literary Authority in Mohamed Choukri’s Al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī.” Under Review in The Journal of Arabic Literature.
- “Le youyou dans la littérature maghrébine : L’amazighité au cœur de la réappropriation littéraire et multilingue.” Expressions Maghrébines, vol. 23, no. 2, Dec. 2024, pp. 109–29.
Recent Courses in RLL
- FREN 10200 Beginning Elementary French II (Spring 2025)
- FREN 20100 French Language, History, and Culture I (Autumn 2025)