Valérie K. Orlando
Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor & Chair, French
Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
3106C Jiménez Hall
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Education
Ph.D., French and Francophone Literatures, Brown University
Research Expertise
20th Century
21st Century
African Diaspora
Afro-Caribbean Studies
Film Studies and Cultural Studies
French and Francophone Studies
Valérie K. Orlando is Professor of French & Francophone Literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has been nominated Affiliate Faculty to the Honors College for AY2025-26. She was the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award AY2023-24. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Grant for 2024. She is also the recipient of the Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair Award (Université de Lyon-Lumière II, Lyon, France, fall 2019), and was Research Fellow at the Collegium de Lyon (L’institut d’études avancées de l’université de Lyon, spring 2020). She is the author of six books, the most recent of which include: The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950-1979 (2017), New African Cinema (2017), and Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (2011). She has published with Cécile Accilien Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives (2021), with Pamela Pears, Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile (2018) and with Sandra M. Cypess, Reimaging the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French and Spanish Caribbean (2014). She publishes articles in French and English on a wide variety of subjects in the areas of Literary Studies, Women’s Studies, African Cinema, and French and Francophone Studies, specifically focusing on Africa and the Caribbean. Since 2004, she has worked as Series Editor for After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France with Lexington Books.
Courses
Université Lumière Lyon II, Lyon, France (fall 2019)
4DLMB101 : La littérature et le cinéma féminin du Maghreb: « Ecritures féminines » des voix insoumises (Masters II Level), (taught in French)
University of Maryland, 2006-present
Undergraduate courses
FREN242: Francophone Writers of Africa and the African Diaspora in Translation (taught in English)
FREN243: Masterpieces in French and Francophone Cinema (taught in English)
FREN301: Style et Composition (taught in French)
FREN313: Le monde francophone (taught in French)
FREN387: Critical Writing on France and the French-Speaking World: “Detective Fiction, Crime Novels and Film Noir in France and the French-Speaking World” (taught in French)
FREN404: “Beur & Banlieue Literature & Cinema in Contemporary France” (taught in French in Nice, France, Maryland-in-Nice Program)
FREN421/FILM421: African “Francophone Film”, from 1960 to the present (taught in English)
FREN488a: “Imaginary and Memory in the Reality of Francophone African Film from 1960 to the present” (taught in English)
FREN488b: Topics in Francophone Literature (Taught in French)
FREN488v: Francophone Literature and Film (Taught in French)
FREN498G: Gender and Identity in Film and Literature of the French-Speaking World (Taught in French)
499D: « Du réel au surréaliste : La France au 20e-21e siècle en littérature et cinéma : guerre, révolution, imagination et transformation » (taught in French)
FREN 499P: Les Classiques du polar et du film noir: En France et le monde francophone (taught in French)
HHUM105: “Introduction to the Humanities” (taught in English to Honors Humanities students)
HONR299Z : “Contemporary Voices of Africa and the Caribbean in Film and Text” (Taught in English, Spring 2021)
HONR349K—Global Experience in Morocco (Spring 2011)
Graduate Seminars (MA & PhD)
FREN600 : Literary History, Theories, and Methodologies for French and Francophone Studies (taught in French)
FREN699A: La folie dans la littérature des femmes de l’Afrique et des Caraïbes (taught in French)
FREN699B : Théories, Philosophies et Textes Révolutionnaires du Monde Francophone (taught in French)
FREN699G : La littérature et le cinéma féminin du Maghreb: « Ecritures féminines » des voix insoumises
FREN699J : L’Influence du Nouveau Roman sur les écrivains du Maghreb, 1948-1968 (taught in French)
FREN699M : Rage, Folie, Guerre et Amour dans la littérature des femmes du monde francophone (taught in French)
FREN699M/SPAN780 Writing H(er)stories: Murder, Madness and Texts of Transgression by Women Writers of the Caribbean (French & Spanish Graduate Seminar, team-taught in English, Spring 2011)
FREN699O: Autour du roman algérien: 1900 aux années 2000 (taught in French)
FREN699Q : Du surréel au réel : études de fiction française des 20e et 21e siècles (taught in French)
FREN699V: Une Histoire littéraire des Caraïbes francophones: A Literary History of Francophone Islands in the Caribbean (taught in French)
FREN899: Independent Study on Literature of the Mashreq with a PhD student
FREN899: Independent Study on Canadian Literatures in French with a PhD student
LLC698E Special Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies: Haiti: Literature and Ideology; (1 credit Graduate Seminar)
SLLC698W Graduate Writing and Time Management; (1 credit Graduate Seminar, co-taught, Spring 2016)