Paola Sanges Ghetti

PhD French Studies

Email: paola dot sanges-ghetti at warwick dot ac dot uk

About

I am a PhD student in French and Francophone Studies, under the supervision of Professor Pierre-Philippe FraitureLink opens in a new window.

I previously studied French theory (focusing on Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida), comparative and Lusophone literature at graduate and undergraduate level in Brazil, at the State University of Campinas and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. I then moved abroad, living in France and in the UK, where I worked for a number of years as a translator and interpreter (trained at Leeds University) working across English, French and Portuguese before re-entering academia in Warwick with a doctoral project on the Lebanese/Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad. The project is informed by my experience of working as an interpreter in the UK (with asylum seekers and indigenous representatives), and brings together deconstruction, trauma, multilingualism and animal studies.

Since October 2024 I have worked as Book Reviews Editor for the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial StudiesLink opens in a new window - SFPS.

Research

My project contends that the work of Lebanese-Canadian writer and director Wajdi Mouawad makes a profound contribution to exile and memory studies through its approach to narratives of the self in the face of traumatic rupture. These are narratives characterized by the precariousness of the protagonists’ attempt to build a history from unstable, fragmentary elements, and to reconstruct an originally absent origin. Access to this ‘origin’ is therefore not simply impeded, but rather becomes indirect, inventive, and – given the characters’ epistemological, geographical and linguistic dislocation – necessarily open-ended.

One of the distinctive contributions of my thesis is to show how Mouawad draws attention to intersecting histories of trauma, violence and oppression that are often treated in separate academic silos (for example, I bring together indigeneity, animal studies, exile and multilingualism, and contemporary politics of enmity).

My thesis will be the first in-depth study to focus on the specifically cross-cultural and transnational dimensions of traumatic inheritance in his work and to ground this in a rigorous, deconstructive theoretical framework. On this basis, I will consider Mouawad’s profound contribution to key contemporary discussions, both on the intersections of personal trauma with broader geopolitical and colonial histories, and on responsibility and reparation for inherited violence.

Teaching

Slavery and After: Writing the Francophone Caribbean (contributor)

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/frenchmodules/fr329ps/

The Story of Modern France (FR121):

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/frenchmodules/smf/

Modern French Language II - Translation (FR201):

https://moodle.warwick.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=64493

Translation: Methods and Practice (LN102)

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/tts/ln102/

Undergraduate Translation Project (LN313)

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/crossschool/ln313/

Memory, obliviousness and postmemory (April 2022-September 2022).

Teaching assistant at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in the Theory of Literature Department. In this role I assisted Professor Marcelo Jacques de Moraes and taught 3 lectures on topics that are close to my recent research, including on trauma, postmemory and multidirectional memory.

Scholarships and Awards

Society for French Studies - Simon Gaunt Postgraduate Travel Grant, 2025
Society for the Study of French History - Postgraduate Research Grant, 2025
SMLC Doctoral Scholarship at Warwick University (2023-2027).
SCIC bursary for interpreters from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Interpretation, 2018
FAPESP scholarship, awarded by the state of São Paulo, 2013.
CNPQ scholarship – awarded by the Brazilian national funding agency, 2010.

Paper presentations

The other within: interconnected subjectivities and ‘radical nuance’, SFS conference, 'Fanon and coloniality' panel. University of Bristol, June 2025.
Mother and mother tongue: translation and mediation in an imagined 'return home', ASMCF conference, University of Southampton, 2024.
Weaving non-human solidarities, research paper for the SMLC Symposium - University of Warwick, May, 2024.
Animality and absent origins in the backlands, paper for the conference Rethinking Latin America: New Journeys Across Film and Literature, April 2024.
Traumatic intertwining: the voice of animals in Wajdi Mouawad’s Anima, research paper for the seminar 'Trauma as a Crisis of Relationality- Beyond the Nature-Culture Divide', ACLA annual conference, Montreal, March 2024.
De la respiration au souffle – l'expérience de la pensée chez Jean-Luc Nancy, Athens, 2015
The passages of breath: Body and resonance in Jean-Luc Nancy, London, 2014.
The unstable heart of writing: Considerations based on Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc, Nancy. Queretaro University. Mexico, 2013.

Events organisation and editorial work

Book reviews editor for the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial StudiesLink opens in a new window for the following issues: Spring/Summer 2025, 15.1 (ISSN 2044-4109); Autumn/Winter 2025 (forthcoming). October 2024 -
Co-founder of the student-staff led Warwick series ‘Falling Skies: Conversations on Ways of Being in an Era of Eco-Social Catastrophe’, a multidisciplinary working group on the environmental humanities involving scholars from Modern Languages, Philosophy, History, Comparative Literature and Life Sciences. Academic year 2025/2026.
Editorial board member for the Postgraduate journal 'Revista Escrita', at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, during my MA.
Organiser of a series of talks and one-day conferences around world literature, poetry, story telling, and French theory, as part of a two-year special program group during my BA in Lusophone and comparative literature.

Peer reviewed publications

Sanges Ghetti, P. (2014), 'Listening to the world: Sound and Sense in Coexistence' (À escuta do mundo: Som e sentido na co-existência’), Revista Escrita, 2014(18). https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/23082/23082.PDF.
Translation of: Nancy, J.-L. (2013), 'Meditation on method' (‘Meditação de Método’) Alea : Estudos Neolatinos, 15(2), pp. 303–311. https://www.scielo.br/j/alea/a/ydbN6kvChbQ7CcbG6jR9Bgf/?lang=pt.
Sanges Ghetti, P. (2013), 'A philosophy that is the trembling of a sound: On meaning in Jean-Luc Nancy’ (‘Uma filosofia que seja o estremecer de um som: Sobre o sentido em Jean-Luc Nancy), Outra travessia, 1(15). https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/Outra/article/view/2176-8552.2013n15p147.

Memberships

ASLE-UKI - Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

SFPS - Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies

SFS – Society for French Studies

ASMCF - Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France

ACLA – American Comparative Literature Association