Kylie Sago, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, French
Comparative International Studies
French Undergraduate Advisor
College of Arts and Letters
SDSU
Bio
Kylie Sago is an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Comparative International Studies at SDSU. Her research and teaching center on the literary and cultural histories of the French empire and their legacies in the present. She is a faculty affiliate of the Digital Humanities Initiative at SDSU, Web Editor of the H-France Forum, and SDSU Universal Design for Learning Faculty Ambassador.
Her book, titled Revising Race: Literary Adaptation and the French Empire, is under contract with Liverpool University Press. When narratives in French from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth century were adapted, their representations of race transformed: shifted onto entirely different characters, made more ambiguous or more stark, characterized in different terms, or written out entirely. Revising Race shows how these adaptations expressed, reworked, and at times troubled historical conceptions of race. In so doing, they taught readers to read race, both within the stories themselves and in the broader world around them. By tracing how race shifts across adaptations of cultural narratives, we see precisely what it means to describe race as a construction and witness that construction in literature.
Dr. Sago has published articles on topics including the forgotten colonial contexts of “Beauty and the Beast,” beheaded imperial statues, and premature attempts to commemorate abolition. These can be found in venues including Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and the edited volume Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts: Chance and Choice. She likewise previously assisted Andrew Sobanet in editing Revisioning French Culture (Liverpool, 2019).
Education
- Ph.D., Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 2021
- M.A., Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 2014
- B.A., French and English, Georgetown University, 2013
Areas of Specialization
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in French; French empire; race; antislavery and abolitionist literature; adaptation; material culture
Courses
- CINTS 440 Global Cultures through Objects and Stories (Spring 2027)
- FRENC 201 Readings in Francophone Culture
- FRENC 305A Survey of French Literature I
- FRENC 305B Survey of French Literature II
- FRENC 421 French Civilization
- FRENC 495 French Internship
- FRENC 520 Adaptation in Literature
- FRENC 530 Media of Empire
- FRENC 530 Early Modern Race and Gender
- FRENC 631 Literature and Empire
- FRENC 720 Adaptation in the Francophone World
- FRENC 798 Special Study
Publications
Revising Race: Literary Adaptation and the French Empire, under contract with Liverpool University Press.
Sago, Kylie. “Challenges in Commemorating the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the Académie d’Amiens Poetry Contest of 1819 and 1820,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 52.3–4 (Spring-Summer 2024), 155–72.
Sago, Kylie. “Colonial Encounters of La Belle et la Bête.” In Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy: Chance and Choice, edited by Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene, 59–69 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
Sago, Kylie. “Beyond the Headless Empress: Gabriel Vital Dubray’s Statues of Josephine, Edouard Glissant’s Tout-monde, and Contested Monuments of French Empire,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 41, no. 5 (December 2019): 501–19.
Revisioning French Culture, edited by Andrew Sobanet with Kylie Sago (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019).
Sago, Kylie. “Eating the Inedible: The Colonial Market at the Exposition Universelle of 1889.” In Proceedings of The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2014: Food and Markets, edited by Mark McWilliams, 362–371 (London: Prospect Books, 2015).