2020 LSA Collegiate Fellow (Comparative Literature)
About
Dr. Renée Michelle Ragin Randall is a literary scholar trained in literary and critical theory, visual culture studies and the study of trauma and memory. She is a former US Foreign Service Officer with tours of duty in Washington, DC and Saudi Arabia.
Current Work:
Dr. Randall’s current project, Mad Archives of the Lebanese Civil War, identifies “madness” as a prevailing idiom used by Lebanese writers (working in Arabic and French) and visual artists to describe the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war and its aftereffects. Drawing out theories of madness from political speeches, fiction, documentary film, and photography-based art, from independence to the present day, Dr. Randall demonstrates how an idiom which straddles multiple decades, media, and sects serves as an index of Lebanon’s status as a “postcolony.” Suturing the history of the war with pre- and post-war socioeconomic and political realities, Randall details how writers and artists imagine the country as a site of temporal and spatial proliferation, repetition and recreation: a condition which provokes ongoing ontological and existential crises — madness — at the level of both the body politic and the psychic body.
Randall is also researching her second project, a multi-disciplinary historiography of the concept of “moral injury,” and an inquiry into its ability to travel globally, beyond the geopolitical context of the post-Vietnam War United States.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Global South studies, Middle East studies, militarization, world literature, memory studies
