Alexandra Kurmann is Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies. She completed her PhD in Comparative French and German Literature at the University of Melbourne (2014) and a Masters in European Comparative Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. She is a specialist in French and North American Vietnamese Diaspora Literature, and works more broadly on refugee and migrant literatures in the postcolonial and global contexts. 

She is on the editorial board of the Edinburgh University Press monograph series, 'New Directions in Francophone Studies: Diversity, Decolonization and Queerness', and is a member of the 'Asie du Sud-Est Research Network' [ASERN]. 

Alex's research interests lie in the field of Comparative Literature and in the application of 20th century French philosophy and theory to literary analysis. She works on Vietnamese diasporic writing from a global perspective, bringing into dialogue literatures from the English and French speaking worlds. Her current research project examines the intersection of queerness, refugeeism and class in the work of Ocean Vuong. 

Research Output:

Alex's first monograph, Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader, was published in 2016. It is the first book in the English langauge to explore the work of the Vietnamese-French author, Linda Lê. It reveals and traces a 14 year intertextual relationship between Lê and her self-chosen precursor, the post-war Austrian poet-turned-writer, Ingeborg Bachmann. 

Alex has published widely on diasporic literature in the journals Comparative Literature, The Australian Journal of French Studies, The Women in German Yearbook, and in edited collections published by Routledge, Éditions Classiques Garnier and PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, including the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora.

Alex has taught and convened across all levels of French Studies, and has designed and delivered French langauge, Francophone Literature and Comparative Literature units. She currently convenes and teaches FREN1010 and 1020: French Studies 1 and 2; FOAR7008: Globalising Cultures and INTS3020: Language, Literature, Translation - Intercultural Perspectives. She contributes lectures and seminars on French and Francophone culture, cinema and language to interdisicplinary units in the disicline of Languages and Cultures in the Faculty of Arts.