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Department of Historical and Cultural Studies

Anissa Talahite-Moodley

Headshot of Anissa Talahite-Moodley smiling with shoulder-length light brown curly hair and wearing dark framed glasses
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Email
anissa.talahite.moodley@utoronto.ca

Anissa Talahite-Moodley is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream. Anissa’s teaching and research interest focuses on the ways in which writers, filmmakers and artists are reshaping traditional discourses of home, nation, gender and sexuality. Her initial research was on South African women’s writers during the years of apartheid. She then went on to examine the literature by writers from the North African diaspora in France and in Canada. She has published a wide range of journal articles and book chapters (in French and in English) on the intersection of migration and gender discourses as reflected in literature and cinema. Her publications include Problématiques identitaires et discours de l’exil dans les littératures francophones (Ottawa University Press, 2007). In 2013, she co-authored Gender and Identity (Oxford University Press); and in 2014, she co-edited a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies on Women from the Maghreb (2014). She also has an interest in psychotherapeutic discourse, particularly the work of Carl Rogers and Frantz Fanon. She co-edited Carl Rogers Counsels a Black Client: Race and Culture in Person-Centred Counselling in 2004. Anissa has also published research on the significance of visual representations in the construction and deconstruction of the racialized and gendered ‘other’ by comparing the work of authors from different literary and cultural traditions, such as the African American writer Ralph Ellison and Farida Belghoul, a French writer of Algerian background. Anissa’s interest in gender and representation has also led her to pay particular attention to the reconfiguring of masculinity in contemporary Algerian cinema. Her current project is a study of the literature from the Algerian diaspora in Canada, particularly the work of Nadia Ghalem. Anissa has just returned to UTSC after teaching at Royal Holloway, University of London where she is currently an Honorary Research Associate. She is also a member of the Royal Holloway, University of London Centre for Visual Cultures. In 2020, she became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK).

Education

  • B.A. (University of Oran)
  • M.A. (University of Leeds)
  • Ph.D. (University of Leeds)