Jill Jarvis specializes in the aesthetics and politics of the Maghreb and Sahara. Her first book Decolonizing Memory : Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021) charts a new itinerary for literary studies and theories of testimony, cultural memory, and decolonization in the wake of French empire. Her next book, The Desert is Alive : Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara (University of Chicago Press), builds a case for how contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara confront the colonial ideology of desert emptiness. With Brahim El Guabli and Francisco Robles, she is a founding member of the Desert Futures Collective. Her other writing appears in New Literary History, Representations, PMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, Yale French Studies, Expressions maghrébines, Public Books, and elsewhere.
In her teaching and research, she is dedicated to questioning the assumptions of area studies and methodological orthodoxies. Her work centers the aesthetic and literary, making a case for literature as constitutive—rather than simply reflective—of political agency.