Jessica DeVos

Some of my many passions include foreign languages, Renaissance Europe, and immigration law and narratives. I love both teaching and learning languages. In my research, I never tire of exploring the complexity of Renaissance Europe. My recent work has focused on women poets, female voices, and gender as a lyric construct and has been published in MLN, French Studies, Yale French Studies, Renaissance Studies, and by Oxford University Press. I have just embarked on a new project examining literary and theological supersessionism in Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques. In my work with refugees and distress migrants, I practice “empathetic listening,” a methodology pioneered by Dori Laub, founder of Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony where I worked as a translator for several years. That time at the Fortunoff catalyzed my interest in how we collect, interpret, translate, disseminate, and appropriate the stories of others. Within a legal context, these questions have crystallized into a concern with the role of personal narratives in adjudicating protected status of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. While my interests may, at first glance, seem unrelated, they all reflect my belief in the power of stories, when received by an attentive reader or empathetic listener, to transcend cultural and temporal boundaries.

“Real courage, Montaigne suggests, comes in facing death and pain while one is in love with human life.” – David Quint