Paola Sanges Ghetti

About

I am a PhD student in French and Francophone Studies, under the supervision of Professor Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Dr Michela Coletta. My PhD is fully funded by the SMLC Doctoral Scholarship.

I previously studied comparative literature at graduate and undergraduate level in Brazil, focussing on French theory (particularly Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida), French cinema and Brazilian/Lusophone literature and culture. I then moved abroad, living in France and the UK, and training as an interpreter and translator at Leeds University. After working for several years across my main languages (EN/PT/FR/SP/DE), I re-entered academia at 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.

From October 2024 to December 2025 I worked as the Book Reviews Editor for the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial StudiesLink opens in a new window - SFPS. From January 2026 I have been working as co-editor of the same journal.

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, extractivist and colonial histories, and on responsibility and reparation for inherited violence.

Teaching

• Slavery and After: Writing the Francophone Caribbean (FR329), guest lecturer: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/frenchmodules/fr329ps/
• Translation: Methods and Practice (LN102), seminar tutor: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/tts/ln102/
• Undergraduate Translation Project (LN313), seminar tutor: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/crossschool/ln313/

• The Story of Modern France (FR121), seminar tutor: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/frenchmodules/smf/
• Modern French Language II - Translation (FR201), seminar tutor: https://moodle.warwick.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=64493 
• Portuguese beginners accelerated (LL292); Portuguese intermediate accelerated (LL299); Portuguese advanced (LL324), contributor.
• Memory, obliviousness, postmemory (April 2022-September 2022), guest lecturer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SElzJpYvhp-hzgjc9DZgk3GmJaayNGIK/view ('Memória, esquecimento, pós- memória: experiências estéticas e tramas conceituais'). 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 three 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, 2011.

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 João Guimarães Rosa, 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 (https://www.frenchphilosophy.gr/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.
• The resistance of poetry according to Jean-Luc Nancy (A resistência da poesia segundo Jean-Luc Nancy). Federal Univerisity of Santa Catarina. Florianópolis, 2013.

Events organisation, archive and publishing-related work

• Co-editor of the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial StudiesLink opens in a new window - SFPS. Since January 2026.
• Book reviews editor for the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies.Link opens in a new window October 2024-January 2026
• Co-founder of the student-staff led Warwick series ‘Falling Skies: Conversations on Ways of Being in an Era of Eco-Social Catastrophe’: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/news/events/fallingskies/. Academic year 2025/2026 (six events in total which brought together Warwick scholars from a number of areas).
• Production and Rights Assistant for the French and Portuguese teams at Penguin, London. October 2019-March 2021.
• 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 (PET) during my BA.
• Archivist at the Brazilian literature Archive-Museum of the Casa de Rui Barbosa Foundation, during my BA. This is where archives of writers such as Clarice Lispector and Manuel Bandeira are located and I was responsible for the archives of Cacaso and Antonio Fraga.

Publications

• 'Wajdi Mouawad's Anima: Transforming trauma through the deconstruction of the human-animal divide', Modern & Contemporary France, 2026.
• 'Listening to the world: Sound and Sense in Coexistence' (À escuta do mundo: Som e sentido na co-existência’), Revista Escrita, 2014.
• Translation of: Nancy, J.-L. 'Meditation on method' (‘Meditação de Método’) Alea : Estudos Neolatinos, 15(2), pp. 303–311, 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).

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