Rate My Professor Alexandra Kurmann

Alexandra Kurmann is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies in the School of International Studies, Faculty of Arts, at Macquarie University. She earned her PhD in Comparative French and German Literature from the University of Melbourne in 2014 and her Master of Arts in European Comparative Literature from the University of Kent in 2007. Kurmann's academic interests center on comparative diaspora and Francophone literatures, specializing in Vietnamese diasporic writing examined from a global perspective that dialogues between English- and French-speaking literary traditions. Her research also explores intersectional narratives at the intersections of queerness, diaspora, and class.

Her monograph, Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader (2016), is the first book in English dedicated to the Vietnamese-French author Linda Lê, analyzing a 14-year intertextual engagement with Ingeborg Bachmann. Recent peer-reviewed articles include "Kindred Beholden-ness: a new name for kinship, from Octavia Butler to Ocean Vuong" (MELUS, 2025), "Looking through the eyes of the Other: Sartrean reader consciousness" (Poetics Today, 2025), and "Writing millennial lives at the intersection of class, queerness and refugeeism: Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" in The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel (2025). She has contributed chapters to the Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora (2024), such as "Documentary film memorialisation of Vietnamese indentured labour in France and New Caledonia: sighting history" (with Tess Do) and "The transdiasporic turn towards multiplicity in contemporary Francophone and American Việt Kiều literature." Kurmann's work has appeared in journals including Comparative Literature, The Australian Journal of French Studies, Women in German Yearbook, and Esprit créateur. She serves as an editorial board member for Edinburgh University Press's series New Directions in Francophone Studies: Diversity, Decolonization and Queerness, has edited for PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, and is a member of the Asie du Sud-Est Research Network (ASERN).