Katherine Roseau, Ph.D.

Katherine Roseau, Ph.D., joined the faculty at Mercer University in 2019. She teaches all levels of French, including courses on Nazi-occupied France, transnational francophone and migrant literature, and life writing. In the classroom, Roseau emphasizes interaction, using one’s mistakes to improve, and exposure to diverse francophone accents and perspectives. She teaches with high-impact practices, notably service learning.

Currently a visiting scholar at Sciences Po’s Center for International Studies (CERI) in Paris during her 2026-27 sabbatical, she is conducting a project titled, “Oral History of Helpers: Collective Memory, Identity and Migration in Contemporary Paris.”

A former fellow of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Roseau’s scholarship continues to address the roles of life writing genres in shaping the experiences of Jews in France during the Holocaust and the productive connections between studies of the Holocaust and of migration.

Education

• Ph.D., French Literature, Purdue University
• M.A., French Civilization, Society, and Culture, Middlebury College
• B.A., French, Anderson University

Specialty

As a global French studies scholar and an oral history practitioner, Roseau uses an interdisciplinary framework of theories in memory, place, and cognitive studies to analyze oral and written self-narratives as a way to understand how humans construct their identities in contexts of war, migration, and dehumanizing oppression.

Driven by a desire to show students the relevancy of the French language in the United States and to provide them with meaningful service-learning opportunities, Roseau is currently making connections with Haitian communities in Georgia and organizations who aid refugees.

She is directing — with Libertad Aranza, senior lecturer of Spanish — an oral history project entitled “Integrating Voices of Refugees and Immigrants: Faculty and Curriculum Development.”

Professional Interests

Roseau’s research interests include:

• Life writing (diary, autobiography, correspondence, autofiction)
• 20th century French literature, especially Nazi occupation of Paris
• Holocaust studies
• Oral history
• Cognitive approaches to literature
• Memory studies

Her teaching interests include:

• French language, all levels
• Study abroad
• Nazi-occupied France and the Holocaust
• 20th and 21st century literature, including transnational literature
• Life writing/autobiography
• War writing, including experiences of refugees

Recent Publications

• Roseau, Katherine and Arely Cuevas-Flores. “The Present Bread, the Absent Body: Food and Chaos in Duras’s War.” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 50.1 (2026).
• Roseau, Katherine and Kristen Bailey. “Grasping the Scope of Individual Human Devastation in War: Life Writing’s Place in Mapping in the Classroom.” a/b Auto/Biography Studies 37.3 (2022) 429-436.
• Roseau, Katherine. “Separated Families and Epistolary Assistance: The Mutual Aid That Maintained Correspondence Between Jewish Internees and Their Loved Ones During the Second World War in France.” French Historical Studies 44.s2 (2021) 325-353.
• Roseau, Katherine. “The Diary as Witness to the Holocaust: Materiality, Immediacy, and Mediated Memory.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 25.4 (2019) 492-513.
• Roseau, Katherine. “A Diary Without the I: Embodiment and Self-Construction Through the Other in Felix Hartlaub’s World War II Paris Writings.” Textual Practice 34:7 (2020) 1123-1139.

Contact Katherine Roseau, Ph.D.

478-301-5479
roseau_ka@mercer.edu
Office: Knight Hall, Room 202B