Rachel Gabara

Rachel Gabara teaches literature and film in French, with a particular focus on nonfiction and historical fiction from France and sub-Saharan Africa. Her students work to improve their spoken and written French while studying how and why French is used around the world, developing skills relevant to a wide range of international careers.

The author of From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person (Stanford, 2006), Gabara has published essays on African film in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Wayne State, 2007), Global Art Cinema: New Theories And Histories (Oxford, 2010), and The Global Auteur: Politics and Philosophy in 21st Century Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her current book manuscript, "Reclaiming Realism: From Documentary Film in Africa to African Documentary Film," is based on research supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. Recent articles on this topic include "From Ethnography to Essay: Realism, Reflexivity, and African Documentary Film" (A Companion to African Cinema, Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), “Complex Realism: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Emergence of West African Documentary Film” (Black Camera 11.2, 2020), and “Hunting Images: Sub-Saharan Africa in Early French Cinema” (French Screen Studies, 2022). Gabara's most recent piece, “Restituer: sharing colonial films” (Contemporary French Civilization 48.1, 2023), addresses contemporary debates about restitution and archives in relation to colonial European and postcolonial African filmmaking.