Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is a literary scholar and cultural theorist working at the intersection of North African Studies, Mediterranean Studies, and the Environmental Humanities. Her recent theoretical work on water examines the alternative epistemologies and forms of being that come into existence when rethinking the world through the materiality of seawater. Drawing on biotheory, critical ocean studies, and material ecocriticism, her recent writing examines the dissolutive ontologies specific to drowned migrants whose submerged bodies are amalgamated into ecologically ravaged, deep-sea environments. She is currently completing a monograph titled Residual Waters: Elemental Necropolitics in the Anthropocene. Her most recent co-edited volume, Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (2026), focuses on water as an analytical category. “Water Logics” was the focus of an international conference held at Tulane on April 11–12, 2019.

Talbayev currently serves as Professor Extraordinarius at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). She is the long-time Editor of Expressions maghrébines , the leading peer-reviewed journal of the Coordination Internationale des Chercheurs sur les Littératures Maghrébines (CICLIM), which has been housed in the Department of French and Italian since 2014, and co-editor of the “Passagen” book series at Georg Olms Verlag (Germany). She is a member of the Senior Editorial Board of Public Culture and has served on the editorial boards of several other journals, including Yale French Studies (2009–2013) and the PMLA advisory committee (2021–2024). She is a former chair of the MLA CLCS Mediterranean Forum Executive Committee and a member of the advisory board for the Center for Francophone Research at the University of Leipzig (FFSL). She has recently held visiting appointments at the University of Tunis, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (Knight Foundation Art+ Research Center), Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia (Middle East Studies/DSAAM), Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès (Laboratoire Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes), and the University of South Africa (ISHS).

At Tulane, she is an affiliate of the Middle East and North African Studies program, which she founded in 2022, a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee for the Environmental Studies Program, and a member of the inaugural faculty advisory board for the Tulane Global Humanities Center . Prior to coming to Tulane, Talbayev was Assistant Professor of French at Yale University and an affiliate of the Council on Middle Eastern Studies and the Council on African Studies at the MacMillan Center at Yale.

Talbayev spends part of every year in Central Asia and the Mediterranean. In her free time, she is a baroque musician and an avid martial artist.

Selected Publications

Monograph

• The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean . Fordham University Press, 2017.
  • Mellon Foundation Modern Language Initiative grant recipient
  • Recommended by Choice (January 2018, vol. 55, no. 5, p. 603)

Edited Collections

• Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (with yasser elhariry). University of Virginia Press, 2026. “Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Environmental Humanities” series, eds. Sarah Dimick, Alison Glassie, and Jesse Oak Taylor.
• Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean (with Isabelle Keller-Privat and yasser elhariry). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2025. “Mediterranean Perspectives” series, eds. Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos.
• “Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Environments” (with Brahim El Guabli). Roundtable, International Journal of Middle East Studies 57.1 (February 2025): 124–195.
• Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis . Palgrave, 2018 (Mediterranean Perspectives Series, Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, eds.)—with yasser elhariry.
• Le Maghreb méditerranéen: Littératures et plurilinguisme . Expressions maghrébines 11.2 (Winter 2012)—with Claudia Esposito and Hakim Abderrezak.

Recent Articles and Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

• “Watermarks. Towards a Water Logics” (with yasser elhariry). In Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2026, 1–20.
• “Thinking Ecocritical and Indigenous Terrains” (with Brahim El Guabli). In “Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Environments.” Roundtable, International Journal of Middle East Studies 57.1 (2025): 124–130.
• “Elemental Borders: Countermapping the Geophysical Maghreb.” “Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Environments” Roundtable. International Journal of Middle East Studies 57.1 (2025): 165–173.
• “Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean” (with Isabelle Keller-Privat and yasser elhariry). Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2025, 1–12.
• “Engineering Nature: Extractivism, Risk, and Environmental Crisis in Ahmed Tazi’s Du pétrole et des outardes.” Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere. Eds. Nicki Hitchcott and Ken Toah Nsah. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, “Francophone Postcolonial Studies” series, 2025, 85–100.
• “Deep-Time Borderscapes in Trino Cruz’s Poetry.” “Strategies for Writing Gibraltar into the World.” Ed. Robert P. Newcomb. International Journal of Iberian Studies 38.1 (2025): 61–73.
• “Désaffiliation et temporalités queer dans L’Envers des autres de Kaouther Adimi” . Transgressions en tous genres. Subversions et inter-dits dans les littératures et films (franco-) maghrébins de l’extrême contemporain. Eds. Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner, Julia Pröll, Annegret Richter, and Alfonso de Toro. Baden Baden: Georg Olms Verlag, “Passagen” series, 2024, 37–49.
• “The Residual Migrant: Water Necropolitics and Borderization.” “Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces.” Eds. Bidisha Banerjee, Judith Misrahi Barak, and Thomas Lacroix. Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 26.1 (2024): 21–35. Reprinted in two edited collections.
• “HYDROPOWER: residual dwelling between life and nonlife.” “Water.” Eds. Ewa Macura-Nnamdi and Tomasz Sikora. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 28.1 (2023): 9–21. Reprinted in one edited collection.
• “Le migrant résiduel: Reconfigurations de l’humain dans l’Anthropocène.” “Migration and Environments: Convergences and Divergences of Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism.” Eds. Mona El Khoury and Nikita Obeegadoo. Nouvelles Études Francophones 38.2 (2023): 132–145.