CEMAT (Le Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis) is excited to announce that Imen Chemengui, one of five 2015 Grant for Graduate Research (GGR) scholars, has been at the University of California at Berkeley for the past two months carrying out her research on “The Narration of the Self: Narrative and the Trauma of Colonialism in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction”. Ms. Chemengui, a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at the University of Manouba, is currently preparing to come home after two fruitful months of research at the UC Berkeley library and intense interaction with the scholarly community both on and off campus. During her stay in the U.S., and in addition to becoming fully equipped with online data research skills, Ms. Chemengui managed to conduct two lengthy interviews with Prof. Cathy Caruth (Cornell University), author of “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History” and whose theoretical work forms a pillar in Ms. Chemengui’s research. Such first hand encounters with scholars whose work has great influence on GGR Scholars has an undoubtedly profound impact not only on young Tunisian researchers’ worldview, but also on the quality of their work and the ways in which it engages debates taking place in their respective disciplines. Beyond her on-campus experience and scholarly activities, Ms. Chemengui has also made the best out of her stay in California. She visited places as diverse as Echo Lake, Lake Tahoe, the Sierra mountains, Napa Valley,and towns such as Auburn and Truckee.
Ms. Chemengui at Echo Lake, July 2015.