Ryan Schroth
Ryan K. Schroth is an assistant professor of French Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University. Currently a Zachary T. Smith Faculty Fellow, Dr. Schroth teaches courses in French language, literature, and culture at all levels of the curriculum. His teaching and research interests are clustered around a firm commitment to understanding others, promoting diversity and inclusion, and decolonizing French and Francophone studies.
Dr. Schroth’s academic research focuses on the cultural production of queer artists with ties to the Francophone Maghreb (North Africa). His work employs notions of postcolonial theory, queer studies, affect theory, and diaspora studies in order to better understand the contemporary experiences of queer diasporic subjects moving between the Maghreb and France. He has presented this research at national and international conferences; his written work has been published as book chapters and as articles in journals such as Contemporary French Civilization, The Journal of North African Studies, and The French Review.
He is currently at work on his first manuscript, tentatively titled Affective Orientations: The Queer Body in the Franco-Maghrebian Diaspora. This project focuses on the ways in which certain queer diasporic affects, such as melancholia, fear, desire, and anxiety, materially constitute physical and collective queer bodies. Dr. Schroth is also a co-editor, along with Dr. Siham Bouamer (University of Cincinnati) and Dr. Denis M. Provencher (North Carolina State University), of Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative which is scheduled to appear in Fall 2024 with Liverpool University Press.
At Wake Forest since 2019, Dr. Schroth enjoys teaching a variety of classes, including beginning and intermediate language classes as well as more advanced courses. In his “Queer Stories/Histoires Queer” class, students examine graphic novels, films, and examples of contemporary writing in French in order to understand the contemporary lived experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals in France. In his first-year seminar, “Mapping Queer Migration and Sexuality,” which is taught in English, students study diasporic writing from authors such as Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong and Canadian Sri Lankan author Shyam Selvadurai, among others.
Dr. Schroth is currently the French Studies Lower-Division Coordinator. Students wishing to discuss the lower-level French sequence or their placement test results can reach out to him via email at schrotrk@wfu.edu.
Pronouns: he/him/his
FRH 111-154: Elementary and Intermediate French Language Sequence
FRH 212: Exploring the French and Francophone World
FRH 216: Studies in French Literature and Culture: “Queer Stories/Histoires Queer”
FRH 370: Seminar in French and Francophone Studies: “Sexuality, Migration, & Affect”
FYS 100: First Year Seminar: “Mapping Queer Migrations & Sexualities”