Edwige Crucifix

Prof. Crucifix is a scholar of Modern and Contemporary French and Francophone literature, whose work stands at the encounter of literary studies and cultural history. Her research concentrates on Mediterranean women – with a focus on the Maghreb – in a period extending from the onset of France’s second empire (in the nineteenth century) all the way to today. Through the perspective of comparative literature, her work explores both transhistorical echoes of imperialism and transnational connections that traverse the Mediterranean space. In this setting, she is interested in how identities are shaped and contested through language and literature, with a special attention to how gender, sexuality, race and religion reconfigure identity categories in colonial and postcolonial contexts.  

While focusing mainly on literary fiction, her work encompasses both published and unpublished texts, exploring archival sources (manuscripts, letters, journals, etc…), uncovered during numerous research stays in France, Morocco, Israel-Palestine and Turkey. She considers literary fieldwork an essential aspect of her work, arguing that reading across this broader (and often disregarded) literary material shines a new light on the history of our cultural imaginary. As many women did not historically have access to publication, she considers that minor forms of writing, long excluded from literary studies, are nevertheless worthy of close reading, all the way to the most mundane, like recipes (Captures 2016; Gastronomic Modernism: Food, Literature and Culture, Clemson University Press, 2019). 

In her first monograph, The Colonial Masquerade: Women in Disguise in the French Maghreb (forthcoming), she studies instances of identity deception in the works and lives of French and Maghrebi women writers. She shows how these women engaged in various forms of disguise as a way to transgress cultural and gender norms, drawing lessons for our contemporary political scene where debates about “authentic” identity grow increasingly perilous. Further publications address representations of marginalized religious and sexual identities in the works of Algerian Jewish women writers (MHRA 2019; Queer Jews, Queer Muslims, Wayne State UP 2024); intersections of feminist and (anti)colonial thought, from the Kahina legend (Recherches Féministes 2022) to representations of Muslim women in French discourse (Colonial Continuities and Decoloniality in the French-Speaking World, Liverpool UP 2024); the interplay of fiction and orientalist epistemology in the Atlantis myth (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 2024) and same-sex desire in women’s orientalism. With thesupport of a FIAS fellowship at the Collegium de Lyon (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon), she is currently preparing her next monograph, Avant les Lettres: Femmes juives francographes en Mediterranée (1860-1962), a comparative study of a vast but disregarded archive, which nevertheless constitutes the first francophone female corpus in the Mediterranean. 

At Bryn Mawr College, Prof. Crucifix’s work is further engaged with institutional history. She is most notably invested in preserving the legacy of Marcelle Pardé, Professor of French Literature at Bryn Mawr from 1919 to 1929, who played an important role in the French Resistanceand was killed at Ravensbrück in 1945. In 2025, Prof. Crucifix had the great honor of interviewing Jacqueline Fleury-Marié, a fellow Résistante who knew Prof. Pardé in that camp. In her work, Prof Crucifix also thinks and teaches about what it means to be part of a historically women’s college and engages with students to reflect on this position.