Johanna GALIS is a PhD student at the Université Paris 8 and is currently working on a dissertation project under the supervision of Pr. Andrée-Anne KEKEH-DIKA entitled “Action-Words or the performative process of a socially committed literature : Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Cade Bambara”.

Thanks to her experience working within the media and in community associations where she met various artists and journalists who had become political refugees, Johanna GALIS has been able to take a closer look at the dynamics that helped the emergence of politically and socially committed voices. She holds an MA from the Université Gustave Eiffel in Advanced English Studies. Her doctoral dissertation, based on the literary works of Hurston and Bambara, aims at showing – thanks to the use of sociolinguistic theories by Bourdieu and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, amongst others – the scope of action of their unique literary voices.