Overview
Hannah Hughes earned her B.A. in French and International Relations, and her M.A. in Translation Studies at Kent State University. Now a doctoral candidate at Cornell University’s Department of Romance Studies, she is pursuing research centered on the racialization and gendering of affect. Such a project seeks to explore dysphoric emotions like disgust and shame as they shape ideas about citizenship and belonging. Contemporary France presents a particularly fraught contextual lens for this discussion because the reigning political ideology of républicanisme would consider allegiance to certain social identities as antithetical to individual liberty. Feelings that manifest as a consequence of race, gender, and class cannot be engaged through the presiding political discourse, thereby perpetuating a colonial history of oppression. Her work engages diverse voices across literature, cinema, and popular culture to discover modes of resistance that open possibilities for bodies to feel and feelings to circulate.