Education
Biography
Oana Sabo specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French & Francophone literature and culture, with a focus on migration, diaspora, and refugee studies. She is the author of The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First-Century France (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), which explores the evolution of “migrant literature” from a marginal genre in 1980s France to a genre that has become central to criticism and publishing at the start of the new millennium. Through analysis of literary texts and their consecrating agents (publishers, online reviewers, literary prizes, and language academies), Sabo demonstrates that migrant novels are cultural commodities that mediate between literary and economic forms of value, academic and mass readerships, and national and global literary markets.
Her essays on diaspora, migration, transnationalism, and humanitarianism have appeared in journals including French Cultural Studies, French Forum, Studies in Twentieth & Twenty-First Century Literature, The French Review, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, among others. She is currently working on a book that investigates new literary practices in a digital age.
Research and Teaching Interests
20th- and 21st-century literature, migration and refugee studies, photography history and theory, book history, digital technologies and their impact on the production and reception of contemporary literature