Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2021

Rachel Gabara, associate professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages, works at the intersection of cinema studies, African studies and French and Francophone studies. She has expanded our understanding of literature and film from Africa and Europe in rigorous scholarship grounded in extensive archival research supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a book and a number of essays on autobiographical narrative, transnational modes of nonfiction film, and African cinema in a global context, Gabara has examined the complex connections between the two continents during the colonial and postcolonial eras. She is currently completing a second book, “Reclaiming Realism,” the first comprehensive study of documentary filmmaking in West and Central Africa. Gabara serves as film review editor for the African Studies Review and has organized and facilitated a wide variety of events with African filmmakers and about African cinema.