Alice Pick Duhan Forskare

I am a Research Fellow in French and Comparative Literature in the Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University. My research interests include literary multilingualism, self-translation, world literature theory, and contemporary French and Francophone fiction. 

I have a particular interest in the relatively new research area of translingual studies, which examines the works of authors past and present who have composed literary texts in a second (third, fourth...) language. My doctoral dissertation, Les langues du roman translingue (Dec 2021), examined the contemporary translingual novel in French. A close reading of the novels of Nancy Huston, Vassilis Alexakis and Andreï Makine allowed me to examine three different contemporary understandings of translingual writing: as a mode of translational storytelling, as an ambilingual writing practice based on the alternation between two languages, and as exophony, an adventurous voyage outside of the mother tongue. During my doctoral research, I also participated in the RJ-funded research programme, Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures, a large-scale collaboration involving over 25 researchers from six Swedish universities.

Between 2021 and 2022, I was a researcher within the project, Mediating the Maghreb: Literary Creation, Institutions, Circulation, a collaboration between Stockholm University and Mohammed V University in Rabat, funded by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (Stint). I was a visiting scholar at Mohammed V University in Rabat in May 2022 and contributed a chapter to the forthcoming volume, Passages francophones du Maghreb et transfert culturel (2025, Stockholm University Press). I also taught an undergraduate course on Francophone North African Literature at Stockholm University. 

My most recent projects reflect my broad research interests. The book, Literature and the Work of Universality (2024, De Gruyter), co-edited with Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg and Paul Tenngart, intervenes in debates for and against the validity of world perspectives on literature, whilst also examining how literary texts themselves may contribute to articulating renewed forms of human commonality. Another anthology, Francographie au féminin: l’écriture translingue des autrices suédoises (co-edited with Mickaëlle Cedergren, under contract with Classiques Garnier), examines translingual writing in French by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Swedish women writers.

During the autumn term of 2024, I have been conducting archival work at the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) for an ongoing project exploring how genetic (self-)translation studies may be helpful for studying the creative processes of translingual authors who translate their own work prior to publication. The results of this latter project will be presented over the course of the next two years at a conference and two workshops within the research network “Écrire et traduire au féminin”, a collaboration between the team "Multilinguisme, Traduction, Création" at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM, CNRS), the Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions at the University of Oslo, and the Department of Romance Languages and Classics at the University of Stockholm (2025-2026), with funding from the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

As from January 2025, I will begin a new, individual three-year project, funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR),Translingual Writing post-1945 and the Multilingual Spaces of French Fiction (2025-2027).  (Swedish description here).

I am Assistant Editor of Revue nordique des études francophones/Nordic Journal of Francophone Studies.

I have taught a range of undergraduate courses in French at the University of Stockholm, including Kultur och identitet (Culture and Identity, French III), Frankofoni: språk, kultur och litteratur (Francophonie: Language, Culture and Literature, French II), Modern fransk litteratur (Modern French Literature, French I), Litterära genrer (Literary Genres, French I), Fransk fonetik med uttalsträning (French Phonetics, French I), and Förberedande kurs i franska (Preparatory Course in French).