{"id":254,"date":"2015-08-31T11:47:28","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T15:47:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/profile\/laura-c-balladur-2\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T16:09:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T21:09:50","slug":"laura-c-balladur","status":"publish","type":"faculty-profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/faculty\/profile\/laura-c-balladur\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura C. Balladur"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laura Balladur, Ph.D. Duke University<\/strong><\/p>\n

Laura Balladur is Lecturer in the French and Francophone Studies department at Bates College since 2003.\"\"<\/a> Her broad interests include translation both in theory and practice, cinema, the relationship between literature and science, and the embodied mind. Her dissertation “Imagination, Physiology, and the Dynamics of Representation” (2005) explored the emergence of proto-biology in various 17th and 18th-century scientific texts in Europe. She has published on translation as well as on the history of science. Her latest article offered an alternate reading to Descartes’s dualism. True to her other<\/em> undergraduate degree in Studio Arts, she keeps returning to her interest in creative projects. Currently, she is working on a creative non-fiction project describing our relationship with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both past and present.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>With a generous Faculty Development Grant (April 2022)<\/span>, she traveled to the colonial archives in Brussels, followed by a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the North and South Kivu capitals: Goma, in the foothills of Mt Nyiragongo, and Bukavu, <\/span>at the southern tip of Lake Kivu<\/span>. \"\"<\/a>She wanted to follow the imprints of colonial-era infrastructures onto the present-day territory. The collected voices from the many guides she met reveal the lasting wounds of colonialism with its persisting extractive economies that form the bedrock of our modern life. <\/span><\/p>\n

During the trip to the DRC, she taught a two-hour workshop on The Art of Creative Non-Fiction at the Universit\u00e9 Catholique de Bukavu. In Fall 2022, students in her translation course met over Zoom with a few students from Bukavu who participated in that summer’s workshop. Her students’ translations along with the originals can be found here: Bridges to Bukavu<\/a><\/p>\n

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Teaching (course selection)<\/strong><\/h3>\n