Rachel Gabara

Rachel Gabara teaches literature and film in French, with a particular focus on nonfiction and historical fiction from Europe 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 University Press, 2006), Gabara has published essays on African film in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Wayne State UP, 2007), Global Art Cinema: New Theories And Histories (Oxford UP, 2010), and The Global Auteur: Politics and Philosophy in 21st Century Cinema (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016). Her forthcoming book, Documentary Objectives: Filming Africa from Colonialism to Independence (Indiana UP, 2026), is based on research supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. Related articles 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, 2023). Gabara's “Restituer: sharing colonial films” (Contemporary French Civilization 48.1, 2023)  addresses contemporary debates about restitution and archives, and  “Cinephobia/Cin­ephilia: Modernism and Sub-Saharan African Film” (Modernism/modernity Print plus, 2024) explores the notion of modernist cinephilia with respect to early West and Central African films.