Brigitte Stepanov

Dr. Brigitte Stepanov is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies. She is also the founder and director of the Energy Today Lab, an interdisciplinary energy humanities lab engaged in research, pedagogy, and service with support from the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) and the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI). Trained as a scholar of French and Francophone Studies and as a mathematician, she holds degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada and a PhD from Brown University. At Brown, she was a Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and awarded an Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence. Before coming to Georgia Tech, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of French and Arabic at Grinnell College.

Dr. Stepanov writes and teaches about how categories of being, knowledge, and aesthetic forms are stretched and blurred by violence against land and life, and in turn, how ontologies and epistemologies are shaped by violent events. Her monograph in process, Cruelty: Reading the In-Human, focuses on literary and legal understandings of cruelty and their power to shift and sway what we know as the “human.” Exploring “irregular” forms of violence and their representation in fiction and visual media from Algeria, Rwanda, and France, the book examines the relationship between martial acts and definitions of in-humanity (1940-today). This work is closely tied to her second research project, which examines literary, artistic, and cultural responses to radioactive fallout and its ensuing ecological crisis following France’s nuclear arsenal testing. Research related to Cruelty: Reading the In-Human has been supported by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University, the Human Rights Archive at the Rubenstein Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, the Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives (IMEC) in Caen, France, and the National Endowment for the Humanities through the seminar “The Search for Humanity after Atrocity.”

Dr. Stepanov’s scholarship has appeared in journals and edited book volumes including Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, The French Review, Voix plurielles, and Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East. Among other venues, her photography has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography (TX), the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago (IL), the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and AS220 in Providence (RI), and l’Association Carrefour in Metz, France. There are strong echoes between her visual and textual work. Through both media, she asks what it means (ethically, aesthetically) to remember both place and historically situated moments and to (re)tell the stories of human animals, non-human animals, plants, and objects – from patches of lichen to the detailed brickwork of a monument to her own family’s history.

Her other activities include translation (the Derrida Seminar Translation Project and the work of Peter Szendy and Laura Odello). She is also trained in conflict mediation, having most recently taken part in the Peacebuilding Institute hosted by the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at EMU.

Find out more about her work here, here, and here.