Patrick Lyons

Assistant Professor of French

Contact

patrick.j.lyons4@case.edu
Guilford House 202

I am a scholar of 20th and 21st-century French and Francophone culture and literary history. Before joining the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, I received a BA in French from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and a PhD in French and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. From 2023-2024, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Modern Languages at Duke University.

My current book project, Glory’s Dispossessed: Racial Capitalism and the North African Worker During the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ (1945-1973), charts a literary history of North African labor immigration during the French golden age of capitalism and its afterlives. Through historically situated readings of works by authors such as Driss Chraïbi, Mohammed Kenzi, Mengouchi and Ramdane, and others, I explore how novels and memoirs can shed light on the racialized inner contradictions of capitalist accumulation in France, drawing on literary form to imagine (and often foresee) the exasperation and collapse of these same contradictions under their own logic.

My scholarly work can be found in journals such as French ForumForum for Modern Language StudiesFrench Cultural Studies, and L’Esprit Créateur. I recently guest-edited a Spring 2024 special issue of L’Esprit Créateur on “Racial Capitalism in French and Francophone Studies.” My public-facing criticism, interviews, and translations are published or forthcoming in venues including The Times Literary SupplementSidecar (New Left Review), the Verso Books BlogCabinet MagazineViewpointDiacritik, and Radical Philosophy.

I also write and teach about contemporary radical left Francophone literature, the (decolonial) historical novel, post-1968 French noir, and 20th-century French Marxism and Philosophy.