Sophie Dolto’s academic research focuses on Jean-Patrick Manchette, a French crime fiction writer active between 1966 and 1995. For her Masters thesis in Comparative Literature, she analyzed Manchette’s critical texts on early American noir (Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and W. R. Burnett), and his claim that this genre was ‘a product of the counter-revolution’. In her current project, she is examining Manchette’s cultural and political influences, in particular the Situationist International and the ultra-left and anarchist traditions. She is specifically exploring how geopolitical events and political debates are conveyed in Manchette's work. She also addresses how Manchette's own political theory of noir forced him to adopt complex auctorial strategies.
Ph.D. Candidate, French and Francophone Studies
Specialisation Certificate in Literature and Aesthetics, Université de Genève (Switzerland)
M.A. in Comparative Literature, Université Paris IV Sorbonne (France)
M.A. in Cultural Professions, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre (France)
B.A. in Modern Literature, Université Paris IV Sorbonne (France)
- French and American crime fiction
- 20th-century avant-gardes (Dada in Berlin, in Paris and in Zurich ; Surrealism, Lettrist International, Situationist International)
- Karl Marx, Marxist theory, history of political thought
- Internationalist anti-colonialism
- Illegalist literature (bank robbers autobiographies, critique of work, “teppisme”)
Instructor of FREN 130, 140 and 134 (Intermediate French).
Sophie Dolto and Nedjib Sidi Moussa, “The Situationists’ Anticolonialism: An Internationalist Perspective”, in Hemmens, Alastair and Gabriel Zacarias (ed.), The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook. London: Pluto Press, 2020.
FIGS (French and Italian Graduate Society) : co-president (2016-2017), roundtable organizer (2019-2020).