The Whitney Humanities Center at Yale recently welcomed writer, poet, and translator Samira Negrouche as the Franke Visiting Fellow for the Fall 2025 semester. A multidisciplinary artist, Negrouche has authored eleven poetry collections, an essay collection, and several artists’ books, and has collaborated with musicians and performers. Her work explores themes of identity, trauma, and memory. At Yale, she is beginning a new book project on Algerian identity in the wake of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), as seen through post-revolution literature.
The Franke Visiting Fellows Program, made possible by the generous support of Richard and Barbara Franke, invites one distinguished scholar, poet, or artist to Yale each semester. Fellows pursue independent projects, collaborate with colleagues across the university, and deliver public lectures.
“It is an inspiring gift to count Samira among us this semester, with her original poetic voice and distinctive translative idiom demanding that we cross languages, cultures, and individual barriers to encounter the face of the other,” said Cajetan Iheka, director of the Whitney Humanities Center. “Her expansive corpus broadens our work at the WHC in its ‘enstrangement’ of the ordinary and its familiarization of the strange.”
As a Franke Visiting Fellow, Negrouche joins the 2025–26 Whitney Humanities Center Fellows—junior and senior Yale faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and colleagues from across the university—who meet weekly to discuss works in progress and engage in lively, interdisciplinary exchange.
“Going to our Wednesday lunch conferences is as fascinating as it is to go to different events here at Yale: literature, film, exhibition,” she says. “It always opens unexpected routes for the work in progress.”
Negrouche is spending the semester immersed in research. “I am reading a lot for this project. What we can find in Yale’s libraries is just incredible,” she says. “I’m reading Algerian literature but also sociology, philosophy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis . . . and poetry from different spaces and languages.”
Her upcoming public lecture, “The Archeology of Becoming,” is both a product of her research and a creative milestone in the book’s development: “I am preparing [the lecture] as a literary step that will be, in itself, an object leading into the craft of writing the book. In other words, I am not writing about the book; rather, the research will serve to create different kinds of works, one of them being the lecture as a literary object. This will then pave the way for another kind of writing.”
Negrouche’s lecture will take place on November 10, 2025, and is free and open to the public. We warmly invite faculty, students, and members of the broader community to attend.