Professor Kathryn Lachman joined the faculty of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the fall of 2008. A native of South Africa, she holds a Ph.D. in French from Princeton University (2008). She earned simultaneous B.A. and M.A. degrees in French from Yale University (1998). Professor Lachman was the recipient of a George Lurcy Fellowship for research in Paris (2005-6); she also received the Henry Hart Rice Fellowship for research in Beirut, Lebanon (1998-2000), during which time she taught at the American Community School Beirut and wrote music criticism for the Dailystar. She earned the Premier Prix in violin performance and Premier Prix à l’unanimité for chamber music and history of music at the Conservatoire National de Région de Paris in 1995.  

She is the author of Borrowed Forms: The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), an edited volume entitled Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism and the Caribbean Text (Princeton: PLAS, 2006), articles in Research in African Studies and Music, Sound and the Moving Image, and numerous book chapters on African and Francophone literatures. Professor Lachman’s research and teaching interests include contemporary North African literature, literary theory, intermedial relations between music and literature, Sub-Saharan African literature, migration and diaspora studies, and contemporary French and Francophone film.