Bio

Niloufar joined the French literature graduate program at the University of Minnesota in Fall 2023, completed her M.A. in June 2025, and is now pursuing her PhD. At Stanford, she participates in the Storytelling and Medicine program. Her research takes a historiographical approach to the intersections of French and Francophone literary traditions, the history of medicine, feminist thought, and postcolonial theory. She is particularly interested in how literary and medical discourses have collaborated in the pathologization of racialized and gendered bodies, and how these histories continue to shape contemporary understandings of illness and subjectivity. Drawing on thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem, her work explores questions of representation, translation, and epistemic violence, as well as the ways literature both exposes and conceals the voices of marginalized subjects. Her interest in these issues is grounded in broader concerns about psychiatry’s political responsibility, the ethical stakes of diagnosis, and the role of narrative in mediating suffering.