At Rice University, Jacqueline Couti is a core faculty member in the French Studies program. Since the fall of 2022, she has also served as chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She previously served as associate director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality and was a founding faculty member of the Center for African and African American Studies.

In May 2025, she received the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement, recognizing her excellence in research, teaching, and service.In February 2025, her leadership helped secure Creative Ventures and HRC funding for the symposium Haiti and the World: Global Encounters of the Past, Present, and Future she co-organized with Dr. Linsey Sainte-Claire. In October 2024, she was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of National Education. That same month, she co-organized the international conference Global Black French Studies across Time and Space: The Formation and Future of the Field, in collaboration with Jennifer Anne Boittin, Audrey Célestine, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Trica Keaton, Lorelle Semley, and others.

In August 2023, she co-edited—alongside Jennifer Boittin (Penn State)—the special issue Standing Up & Determined: Black Women on the Move, Black Feminisms in French (Post)Imperial Contexts for the Journal of Women’s History. This bilingual issue, available in French and English, is accessible via jwomenshistory.org. In 2020, she organized and hosted the groundbreaking conference Des féminismes noirs en contexte (post)impérial français? Histoires, expériences et théories in Paris, which significantly contributed to rethinking French and Francophone Black womanhood.

Before joining Rice, Couti taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Kentucky. A highly regarded educator, she has received several teaching awards and led study-abroad programs in France, Morocco, and Martinique. Her research has been supported by international foundations, including the VolkswagenStiftung.

Her research and teaching interests delve into the transatlantic and transnational interconnections between cultural productions from continental France and its former colonies. Her work explores constructions of gender, race, sexuality, identity politics, and nationalism. A central theme is how local knowledge in the colonial and post-colonial eras has shaped literature and cultural self-awareness in former French colonies—especially through specific representations of sexuality.

Selected Publications

1. Books and Edited Volumes

• Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924-1948 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming in 2021).
• Ed. with Kathleen Gyssels, “Mines de rien”: L’Antillaise et l’Afropéenne face aux tropologies, entre mythes et réalités au fil du temps, special issue of Essays in French Literature and Culture 56 (October 2019).
• Ed. and introd., "Les amours de Zémédare" et "Carina" by Auguste Traversay de Sansac (1806) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017).
• Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Paperback 2021. French translation forthcoming in 2022.
• Ed. and introd., Maïotte by Jenny Manet (1896) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014).
• Ed., Discourses of Trans/National Identity in Caribbean Literature, special issue of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 38/1 (March 2011).

2. Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• “Lumina Sophie, Nineteenth-Century Martinique,” in Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder (eds.), Women Claiming Freedom: Gender, Race, and Liberty in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 373-92.
• “Le conte créole: Langue et pouvoir à l’époque contemporaine,” Cités: Philosophie, Politique, Histoire (April 2020), 319-32.
• “Hors de soi: Dissociation et réintégration corporelles dans C’est vole que je vole (1998) de la martiniquaise Nicole Cage-Florentiny,” in Gladys M. Francis (ed.), Amour, Sexe, Genre et Trauma dans la Caraïbe Francophone (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016), 169-80.
• “The Mythology of the Doudou: Sexualizing Black Female Bodies, Constructing Culture in the French Caribbean,” in Susan Bordo (ed.), Provocation: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 131-43.
• “Birthing Chaos: Two-Faced Women, Cultural Conflict and Betrayal in Créoliste Writings,” in Patricia Donatien and Rodolphe Solbiac (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 31-50.
• “La Doudou contre-attaque: Féminisme noir, sexualisation et doudouisme en question dans l’entre-deux-guerres,”Comment s’en sortir 1 (2015), 111-39.
• “Le Bourreau et la victime: Politiques du corps et des rapports sociaux des sexes dans l'œuvre de Gisèle Pineau,”Nouvelles Études Francophones 27/2 (2013), 74-89.