Morgane Cadieu specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone prose, experimental fiction, randomness in literature and theory, materialist philosophies, spaces studies, narratives of social emancipation, and the aesthetics of trains.
Her first book, Marcher au hasard: clinamen et création dans la prose du XXe siècle (2019) reads works by Georges Perec and his experimental peers alongside the ancient philosophy of atomism as a way to reflect on creativity and free will, and to propose new ways of envisioning literary walks in urban settings.
Her second book, On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature (2024) demonstrates that socially mobile writers and characters are the digest of our literary and political moment. It offers a new perspective on class mobility as a formal, literary issue in texts by Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye among others.
She co-edited two special issues: Beaches and Ports with Hannah Freed-Thall (Comparative Literature, 2021) and Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig with Annabel Kim (Yale French Studies, 2023).
With the help of undergraduate students and members of the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design, she 3D printed a train based on Emile Zola’s La Bête humaine.