About

Dr. Brigitte Stepanov is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the School of Modern Languages. She is the founder and director of the Energy Today Lab, an interdisciplinary energy humanities research, pedagogy, and service initiative supported by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, the Strategic Energy Institute, and the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education. Her research, teaching, and creative work are characterized by multifaceted inquiry across disciplines, with a focus on how categories of being, knowledge, and aesthetic forms are affected by violence against land and life, and how ontologies and epistemologies are shaped by violent events. She holds degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada and a PhD from Brown University, where she was a Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and received the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence. Her scholarly work explores representations of violence, including irregular and cruel violence in cultural production such as literature, film, visual art, and music, with particular attention to North Africa, Rwanda, and France. Her monograph in progress, titled 'Cruelty: Reading the In-Human,' examines literary and legal understandings of cruelty and their influence on the concept of humanity, focusing on the relationship between martial acts and in-humanity from 1940 to the present. Additionally, Dr. Stepanov researches responses to radioactive fallout and ecological crises following France’s nuclear testing, supported by various prestigious institutions. Her scholarship has been published in multiple academic journals and edited volumes. She also engages in visual art, with exhibitions that explore memorialization, loss, and the ethics of remembrance, and has been involved in translation projects and conflict mediation training. Her pedagogical approach emphasizes student curiosity, interdisciplinary thought, and experiential learning, and she teaches courses on the history and cultural production of North Africa, sustainability, and introductory French language courses.

Research topics

• Art
• History
• Physics
• Remote sensing
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Harki Writing and the Birth of a National Literature Abroad

  2025-04-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Harki soldiers – Algerians who served as auxiliaries in the French army during the Algerian War – were abandoned by France and deemed traitors by newly independent Algeria after the signing of the Evian Accords in 1962. What is the status, then, of the literature written by the descendants of these soldiers? To whose country does it “belong”? These questions are productive not in their (lack of a) concrete answer, but because they highlight the ways in which harki literature resists any singular “national” label. I see harki literature as a case study in the defiance of classification, laying bare the construction of national identity, the politics of belonging, and the interplay among colonial and postcolonial identities. In order to grasp this complexity, I coin the term “national literature abroad” and argue for reading harki literature as an illustrative example thereof. Though by definition the notion of “national” does not align with the word “abroad,” one needs the other to hold any conceptual value. A “national literature abroad” recognizes the regional within the global; it does not erase belonging to a nation, but allows for this “national” space to be broad, generative, and multiple. The category of “national literature abroad” thus reorients how we think about borders, modes of belonging, allegiance, and adoption, transforming non-belonging into a polysemic identity.

  PublisherDOI

• The implicated subject: Colonial atrocity, harki identity, and an ontology of the in-between

  Violence An International Journal · 2023-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Michael Rothberg’s concept of the “implicated subject” complicates the boundaries between the categories of “victim” and “perpetrator.” Rothberg’s work provides a wide framework developed through a comparative lens, broaching several nations and time periods—and, as I argue, can be extended even further. As I develop in this article, I see the “implicated subject” as a richer notion yet, one that not only imbricates victim and perpetrator but also subject and object, human and inhuman. Thus, focusing on the “implicated subject” as an ontological problematic, I add another case study to Rothberg’s rich work—harki soldiers—in order to underscore how “implicated subjects” shed light on patterns of dehumanization and help us understand permutations of being in times of extreme cruelty.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>La Littérature inouïe: Témoigner des camps dans l’après-guerre</i> Ariane Santerre

  Holocaust and Genocide Studies · 2022-10-13

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How does one translate the horror of the Holocaust? What kinds of survivor narratives emerge in the postwar period? In other words, how does a survivor write about their experiences in a way that is intelligible to those who did not experience the Holocaust? Ariane Santerre’s La Littérature inouïe: Témoigner des camps dans l’après-guerre poses these questions and many more in her thorough interrogation of the linguistic and literary machine that transforms experience into text. Santerre broaches an extraordinary number of primary and secondary sources in a voice that is both analytical and, at striking moments, lyrical. She presents her readers with a study of the intimacy of language while also providing an intimate glimpse into her rigorous thought process and her time in the archive. The result is a work of impressive scale that is methodical as well as poetic. There is another sense of scale here too, as Santerre identifies harmonies and dissonances between texts, each a note arranged in a complex system of testimony and narrative.

  PublisherDOI

• Camille réal. par Boris Lojkine

  ˜The œFrench review · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Camille réal. par Boris Lojkine Brigitte Stepanov Lojkine, Boris, réal. Camille. Int. Nina Meurisse, Fiacre Bindala, Bruno Todeschini. Unité de Production, 2019. The eponymous Camille Lepage (Nina Meurisse) was a photojournalist from France who died in 2014 at the age of 26 in the Central African Republic while documenting the country's still ongoing civil war. Lojkine's biopic details Camille's two journeys to the CAR, showcasing the close ties she cultivates with university students caught up in the escalating violence and the professional relationships she develops with other European journalists in her attempt to publish her photographs of an underreported war. Over the course of the film's 93 minutes, we see Camille incessantly take photos in the CAR, chronicling the fighting between the Séléka and anti-balaka militias. Just enough context—in the form of blocks of onscreen text—is given to understand the intricacies of the conflict that she catches on camera. Though the war is central to the narrative, the film most actively emphasizes Camille's drive to create an archive of life marked by quotidian violence in the landlocked nation in Central Africa. She shoots photos constantly, capturing a broad scope of subjects, including students, protests, buildings, and streets. At times the people she photographs tell her—laughingly, in part—that they are tired of her unabating documentation. At other moments, she is urgently asked to gather visual evidence of civil unrest, revolt, destruction, and loss. But the representation of photography in the film does not simply convey Camille's profession. This is not only an account of her journalistic endeavors and the moments leading up to her death, but also a reflection on form, medium, and, specifically, the materiality of photographs. While we witness the act of photographing repeated throughout the film, more significantly, actual photos abound in Camille. Indeed, the real Camille's work saturates our screens. By watching Camille, we end up seeing what the photographer herself had seen. For example, we observe Meurisse visiting the site of a recent massacre, walking in a grassy patch next to the side of a road. With each snap of her camera on screen, we see an actual photo that was taken by Lepage. Another scene recreates the image of a man with an umbrella. The [End Page 299] film sets up what could have been the immediate moments preceding the composition and capture of this instance—and instant. On screen, a man walks through a narrow hallway lined with corpses and we notice him begin to open an umbrella in order to step out into the rainy outdoors. Once the umbrella is in full view, the film comes to a standstill by becoming Camille's real photo. Camille thus overlays media, playing with the limits between photography and video, and rendering the border between still and moving images opaque. In turn, it documents the act of documentation itself, laying bare the truth-seeking and archive-creating drives behind journalism. Most poignantly, the film asks us to consider how images are framed and what context surrounds them, making us realize how little we know about anything that falls outside a camera's curated field of view. Brigitte Stepanov Grinnell College (IA) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

  PublisherDOI

• Djebar and Scheherazade

  2021-02-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This article performs a close reading of Assia Djebar’s short story “The Woman in Pieces.” Published in 1997 in a collection titled The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories, Djebar’s text is a retelling of “The Story of the Three Apples,” a tale from the Thousand and One Nights, against the backdrop of the Algerian Civil War. Turning to both past and present, I analyze parallels between Atyka, the protagonist of “The Woman in Pieces,” and the figure of Scheherazade, emphasizing the dissimilar functions of their bodies and voices. Building on the notion of body, I engage with a critical reading of Hélène Cixous in order to underscore the relationship between body and text in Djebar’s story. I also read “The Woman in Pieces” in light of other scholarship on rewritings of the A Thousand and One Nights and avatars of Scheherazade. Most notably, I turn to Fawzia Zouari and the idea captured by the title of her 1996 book, To Put an End to Shahrazad. In the final analysis, my examinations dialogue with a rich archive of women’s writing and, specifically, Muslim women’s voices, revealing what it means to reconceptualize Muslim women beyond the figure of Scheherazade.

  PublisherDOI

• La femme en colère : la violence de Moze de Zahia Rahmani

  Voix Plurielles · 2020-04-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Cet article aborde la question de la colère et de la violence au féminin dans Moze (2003) de Zahia Rahmani, un roman qui se penche sur l’histoire d’un harki – de même que l’Histoire des harkis – et de la vie de sa famille après son suicide. Plusieurs formes de violence – tant physiques que textuelles – y sont soulignées, ainsi que l’oscillation entre le privé et le public, le souvenir individuel et collectif, le passé et le présent, la France et l’Algérie. Je soutiens que la narratrice, la fille du harki qui donne son nom au roman, utilise la parole non seulement comme réponse à la violence coloniale, à titre de réplique enragée et violente aux injustices commises contre les harkis, mais encore comme une manière de vaincre le traumatisme de la colonisation et de faire le deuil de ce passé terni.&#x0D; &#x0D; Mots-clés : harki, Algérie, théorie postcoloniale, violence, traumatisme, narration&#x0D;

  PublisherDOI

• La douleur réal. by Emmanuel Finkiel

  ˜The œFrench review · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: La douleur réal. by Emmanuel Finkiel Brigitte Stepanov Finkiel, Emmanuel, réal. La douleur. Int. Mélanie Thierry, Benoît Magimel, Benjamin Biolay. Cinéfrance 1888, 2018. Finkiel's 2018 film adaptation of Marguerite Duras's short stories "La douleur" and "Monsieur X, dit ici Pierre Rabier" is a poignant rendition of Duras's pain while waiting for the return of her husband, Robert Antelme, after his deportation during World War II. The film begins with a voiceover by Marguerite (Mélanie Thierry) reciting the incipit to her journal and stating not remembering having written this text, but knowing she had, thus anchoring the film to its original source. The English translation of Duras's title—Memoir of Pain (also appropriately translated as Memoir of War)—evokes a visceral kind of remembering that the film attempts to reproduce. Indeed, Finkiel's memory of the war through Duras is a collection of slow-moving scenes paced in such a way as to embody the protagonist's agonizing wait, allowing the spectator to fully appreciate the dilation of time. Whether or not Antelme will return is unclear until the end of the film. The moratorium we impose on our quotidian lives by watching the narrative unfold, unsure of how it will end, replicates the much longer suspension of life that is felt by the protagonist. Formally, Finkiel's La douleur remains true to the aesthetics of Duras's text. With an appropriately somber soundtrack that reflects the anxiety of the period, not all is explicitly said or represented in the film. Most notably, it questions the limits of representation by including blurry scenes that indicate an inability to show certain atrocities of war. Where in her text Duras describes [End Page 261] an emaciated prisoner come back from the camps as "autre chose, il reste très peu de lui-même, si peu qu'on doute qu'il soit en vie" (28), the film presents scenes dominated by bokeh (that is, a lack of focus) that conveys the indescribable encapsulated by Duras's autre chose. The scene in which Robert is carried back from Dachau, for instance, is entirely blurred in the film. In the text, Marguerite states how, upon his return, "cette forme [Robert] n'était pas encore morte, elle flottait entre la vie et la mort et on l'avait appelé, le docteur, pour qu'il essaye de la faire vivre encore" (61), even underscoring the "inhuman" feces he produces. And yet in the film, these elements are removed, since Robert's condition when he returns from the camps is unrepresentable. Residing between life and death, inhabiting the fault line between the human and inhuman, Robert is nothing more precise than a forme, unable to be visually represented in its vagueness with anything other than blurriness. In the final analysis, Finkiel's La douleur is a rich accompaniment to Duras's work, further probing how to depict atrocity and offering another look at the (in)human reality of World War II. Brigitte Stepanov Brown University (RI) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

  PublisherDOI

• Post/Past Violence: The Aftermath of Revolutions and Literature as Reconciliation

  Contemporary French and Francophone Studies · 2019-05-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this article I argue that Maïssa Bey’s Pierre Sang Papier ou Cendre (2008) and Puisque mon cœur est mort (2010) highlight Bey’s hesitation to support the use of violence in response to violence. Whereas a figure like Frantz Fanon supports anticolonial violence as the near inevitable reply to colonial atrocity, Bey’s textual representations of brutality during the Algerian War and especially the Algerian Civil War are much more focused on illustrating the dangers of retaliatory violence and demonstrating the power of literature as a mode of healing and reconciliation. I will thus examine how these novels propose reconciliation through fiction—and especially reconciliatory writing in contrast to further violence—in the aftermath of revolution and martial cruelty more generally.

  PublisherDOI

• Space-Time Non-Invariance of the Conformal Geometry and Its Possible Observable Manifestations

  Digital Library of the Belarusian State University (Belarusian State University) · 2014-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  It is supposed that the geometry of the General Relativity flat limit can be described by semi-direct product of the Special Conformal Transformations and Lorentz groups, locally isomorphic to Poincare group. The possible observable manifestations of such a supposition are considered. It is shown that the detected Universe accelerated expansion can be treated as a purely kinematic e˙ect of the proposed space–time geometry. The radar procedure of the distance determination in conformal space–time is described. It is shown that the space intervals conformal contraction gave rise to anomalous violet frequency shift during the monochromatic signal propagation over the closed path. Its relative value equals the Hubble constant multiplied by duration of propagation. The predicted phenomenon is the local manifestation of the cosmologic expansion and, in principle, is accessible to experimental detection.

  Publisher

• АКТИВНО-ИМПУЛЬСНЫЕ СИСТЕМЫ ВИДЕНИЯ И АЛГОРИТМЫ ОПРЕДЕЛЕНИЯ РАССТОЯНИЙ ДО ОБЪЕКТОВ В. А. Горобец, В. В. Кабанов, В. П. Кабашников, Б. Ф. Кунцевич * , Н. С. Метельская, Д. В. Шабров

  2014-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Аналитически и экспериментально установлено, что при формировании изображения объектов в активно-импульсных системах видения можно в общем случае выделить четыре характерных интервала расстояний. Дана физическая интерпретация их возникновения. Предложены четыре алгоритма определения расстояния до объектов при использовании характерных расстояний или измерении калибровочных постоянных. Аналитически и экспериментально показано, что длина зоны видимости определяется выражением, которое содержит сумму длительностей лазерного импульса подсветки и строб-импульса приемной системы. Ключевые слова: активно-импульсная система видения, способ определения расстояния. It has been established analytically and experimentally that the object image formation may be described in terms of four characteristic distances. Physical interpretation of their origin is given. Four possible methods based on the characteristic distances are suggested to find the distance to an object. It is shown that the vision zone depth depends on the sum of durations of the laser and strobe impulses.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• N. S. Metelskaya

  B.I. Stepanov Institute of Physics

  1 shared

• Alexander S. Prikhach

  National Academy of Sciences of Belarus

  1 shared

• Д. В. Шабров

  National Academy of Sciences of Belarus

  1 shared

• Sergey A. Trushin

  Mayo Clinic

  1 shared

• I. L. Katsev

  B.I. Stepanov Institute of Physics

  1 shared

• Alexey Malinka

  1 shared

• V. V. Churakov

  1 shared

• L. M. Tomilchik

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• CTL Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (2025)