Valérie K. Orlando is Professor of French & Francophone Literatures in the Department of French & Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park.  

She is the author of four books: Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb, (Ohio University Press, 1999), Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2003), Francophone Voices of the ‘New Morocco’ in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) and Screening Morocco: Filmic Depictions of a Changing Society (forthcoming, Ohio UP, 2011).  She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Francophone women’s writing from the African diaspora, African Cinema, and French literature and culture. She was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Grant to Morocco and Tunisia in spring 2007 and an American Institute of Maghrebi Studies (AIMS) grant for May-June 2009 to Morocco. She has taught previously at Illinois Wesleyan University (1999-2006), Purdue University (1997-1999) and Eastern Mediterranean University in the Northern Turkish Republic of Cyprus (1996-1997)

Website: http://www.valeriekeyorlando.org

Orlando is currently Director of the Honors Humanities Program at the University of Maryland, http://www.honorshumanities.umd.edu

Email: vorlando@umd.edu

Department of French & Italian, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, 3215 Jimenèz Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742