Alison Rice

Alison Rice is chair of the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures and professor of French and francophone studies at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Francophone literature, with much of her research and pedagogy focusing on the work of authors and filmmakers from Africa and the Caribbean. She has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2022.

Her current work focuses on creative written work that promotes international human rights. Titled “Francophone Peace Studies,” this research explores a unique corpus of texts created by authors who are also activists.

Rice previously was director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame. She is a concurrent faculty member in Gender Studies. She also is a faculty fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.