Trinity Faculty Member Furthers Scholarship at Five College Women’s Studies Research Center

A Trinity College faculty member is dedicating time to writing their first monograph this semester at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center.

Blase Provitola, assistant professor of language and culture studies and women, gender, and sexuality, was named a research associate at the center, housed at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, for the fall semester. They will meet regularly with a cohort of other research associates to offer each other feedback on current projects.

“I am excited to receive feedback on my work from a group of interdisciplinary gender studies scholars,” Provitola said. “Since writing can often feel like such a solitary act, it is also helpful to write in community and talk through challenges with other researchers.”

Each year, the center hosts a cohort of local and international scholars and writers, providing office space, access to Five College resources, and cultivating a community in which feminist work can flourish through interdisciplinary conversations, writing accountability groups, and opportunities to share and receive feedback on works in progress.

Tentatively titled Against Heterocoloniality: Women Desiring Differently in France’s North African Diasporas, Provitola’s monograph “challenges universalizing tendencies in queer studies using a literary and activist archive by women of North African descent who have resisted heterosexuality from the 1970s to the present.”

This monograph—a scholarly publication on a single, specialized topic—will provide a more inclusive and expansive account of feminist and LGBT literature and social movements in France, said Provitola. “It has informed a number of Trinity classes that I’ve taught in the Francophone Studies Program and in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program,” they added.

In addition to the research associateship, Provitola recently won the Lawrence Schehr Memorial Award, which is awarded by the scholarly journal Contemporary French Civilization (published by Liverpool University Press) for the best conference paper submitted by a junior colleague in the field of contemporary French and Francophone civilization and cultural studies. They received the award for the paper, “The Right to Complexity: Ambivalence as Political in Fatima Daas’ The Last One,” presented at the 2024 Modern Language Association convention. The winner of the award is invited to expand their conference paper into a full-length article to be published in CFC. 

Provitola has published on postcolonial literature, lesbian of color activism, race and sexual identity, and inclusive pedagogy in journals including Modern and Contemporary France and Transgender Studies Quarterly.

The Five College Women’s Studies Research Center is supported by the Five College consortium of Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.