Franke Visiting Fellows

Samira Negrouche
Critically acclaimed writer, Franke Visiting Fellow
Monday, November 10, 2025 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
276

Archeology of Wounds and Identities

Critically acclaimed writer Samira Negrouche was born in Algiers where she continues to live and work. Author of eleven poetry collections, several artists’ books, and a collection of essays, she is a poet and a translator. In her multidisciplinary work, she frequently collaborates with musicians, visual artists, and choreographers with whom she experiments with new forms of writing and creates live performances.

Her poetry has been translated into thirty languages and widely published, and her books have been published in Spanish, Italian, and Bulgarian.  As a translator, she mainly translates from Arabic and English into French.

Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the National Translation Award in Poetry. Her books in English include The Olive Trees’ Jazz and Other Poems (Pleiades Press, 2020, translated by Marilyn Hacker) and Solio (Seagull Books, 2024, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson). 

Her most recent publications in French, her principal written language, include J’habite en movement, 2001–2021 (Éditions Barzakh, 2023), Stations (Éditions Chèvre-feuille étoilée, 2023) and Pente raide, with Marin Fouqué (Actes Sud, 2025).

While she holds a degree from the Faculty of Medicine of Algiers, in her career she has privileged her literary craft over the practice of medicine.

She is known for exploring themes such as memory and transmission, lost genealogies, borders, languages, identities, and trauma. During her time at the Whitney Humanities Center as a Franke Visiting Fellow, she will be working on a new project called “Archeology of Wounds and Identities,” exploring the shadows of postcolonial Algeria and addressing the invisible remnants of war and resistance whose echoes shape today’s multiple fragmentations and violence.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Fiction Writer, Franke Visiting Fellow
Wednesday, March 26, 2025 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

Alkebulan: When the Lions Returned

Jennifer Makumbi introduces her forthcoming pan-African novel, Alkebulan: When the Lions Returned, followed by a reading and discussion.

Civilizations are living things: they are born, they grow and die. Nations too, rise and fall. Europe and its spawned nations are declining. Africa cannot afford to stumble into global power as if drunk.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi  is a Ugandan fiction writer and author of The First Woman (A Girl Is a Body of Water in US/Canada) which won the Jhalak Prize 2021, was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Award 2021, the Encore Prize 2021, the James Tait Black Prize 2021 and longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize 2021. Her first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani Manuscript Project (2013); the Prix Transfuge du meilleur premier roman (2019); was shortlisted for Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award (2019) and longlisted for the Prix Médicis (2019). Her collection of short stories, Manchester Happened (Let’s Tell This Story Properly in US/Canada) was shortlisted for the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition in 2019 and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. To work on her current project, Makumbi was Writer-in-Residence at NIAS-KNAW (the Netherlands) in 2021, Artist-in-Berlin DAAD in 2022, and Artist in Residence at STIAS Stellenbosch 2023. As a Franke Visiting Fellow in 2024–25 she hopes to complete the Pan-African novel, Alkebulan: When the Lions Returned. She is a recipient of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize (2018). She also won the Global Commonwealth Short story prize in 2014. She has a Ph.D. from Lancaster University and has taught in several universities in the United Kingdom. 

Cosponsored by Council on African Studies

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Ali Oppenheimer
Rozina Ali and Mark Oppenheimer
Tuesday, February 20, 2024 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

How to Think about Antisemitism and Islamophobia

A panel discussion featuring Rozina Ali (journalist, contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and 2024 Franke Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center) and Mark Oppenheimer (author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood and Vice President of Open Learning at American Jewish University).

The first 80 attendees will receive a copy of Squirrel Hill by Mark Oppenheimer.

Co-sponsored by Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism; Yale Program for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; MacMillan Council on Middle East Studies; Jewish Studies; and Whitney Humanities Center

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Rozina Ali
Rozina Ali
journalist, Franke Visiting Fellow
Tuesday, February 6, 2024 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

Islamophobia Yesterday and Today

Thinking through similarities and differences between the post­–9/11 and the post–10/07 eras.
 
Rozina Ali is a journalist, and currently a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. Her work focuses on the Middle East and South Asia, conflict, immigration, and Islamophobia. She also writes about literature and poetry. Previously, she was on the editorial staff at the New Yorker, and was a senior editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, based in Cairo, Egypt. In 2022–23, she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and is a current fellow at Type Media Center.
 

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Sheila Heti
Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 4:00 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

What Is a Process?

In her public lecture, “What Is a Process?” novelist Sheila Heti, our Fall 2022 Franke Visiting Fellow, invites us into the processes she uses in the writing of her books—both the expected and the unexpected. She offers a glimpse into the novel she’s currently writing while she’s with us here in New Haven, and speaks about the role of collaboration with other people, and other domains, in the shaping of her ideas.

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be? She recently published her second children’s book, A Garden of Creatures, illustrated by Esmé Shapiro. She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by the New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Motherhood was chosen by New York magazine and the critics of the New York Times as the Best Book of the year, and How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. Her nonfiction collaboration Women in Clothes, which includes the words of 639 women from around the world, was a New York Times bestseller. She is the former Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine, and has interviewed many writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Dave Hickey, and John Currin. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives and works in Toronto.

You Can’t Translate What You Can’t See: Between Languages in the U.S. Immigration System

How are power structures and empathy implicated in translation? What do we owe asylum seekers, and the stories they bring? What does it mean to bear witness, or to take action? Based on her experiences as an observer and translator in different parts of the U.S. immigration system, Alejandra Oliva reflects on the ways, both big and small, that the system fails the people within it—and the shift required to fix it.

Jewish Survival and Holocaust Memory: Salo Baron and the Twentieth Century

This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s commitment to rebutting the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history by emphasizing the theme of survival, but it will also examine that critique in the context of Holocaust memory that gradually began to emerge after the Second World War.

Alejandra Oliva
Thursday, April 21, 2022 | 4:00 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

You Can’t Translate What You Can’t See: Between Languages in the U.S. Immigration System

How are power structures and empathy implicated in translation? What do we owe asylum seekers, and the stories they bring? What does it mean to bear witness, or to take action? Based on her experiences as an observer and translator in different parts of the U.S. immigration system, Alejandra Oliva reflects on the ways, both big and small, that the system fails the people within it—and the shift required to fix it.

Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer, and translator working in immigration advocacy. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, nominated for a Pushcart prize, and helped her secure an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. She is the translator for a bilingual edition of A Is for Asylum Seeker by Rachel Ida Buff (2020, Fordham University Press).

Her nonfiction chapbook, Declaration, was published by Guillotine Books (2016). She holds a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and works as a communications coordinator at the National Immigrant Justice Center. She lives in Chicago with her husband and their dog. You can see her latest work at olivalejandra.com

During her Franke Visiting Fellowship, Oliva plans to complete her upcoming book project on translation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Her book, Rivermouth, is forthcoming from Astra House in 2023.

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James McAuley
Thursday, April 7, 2022 | 4:00 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

Jewish Survival and Holocaust Memory: Salo Baron and the Twentieth Century

This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s commitment to rebutting the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history by emphasizing the theme of survival, but it will also examine that critique in the context of Holocaust memory that gradually began to emerge after the Second World War.

James McAuley is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post writing on European affairs. During his Franke Fellowship at the Whitney, he is continuing research on his next book, “Black Milk of Dawn.” While at Yale, he will also be finishing a short biography of the Zionist benefactor Edmond de Rothschild, for the Jewish Lives biography series at Yale University Press. This follows the publication in 2021 of his first book, The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France, also with Yale University Press. He earned his PhD in Modern European History at Oxford in 2016, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.

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