Karl A. Britto

Karl A. Britto is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He currently serves as Associate Dean of Arts & Humanities, overseeing academic programs in these disciplines. His work focuses on Francophone colonial and postcolonial literatures of Vietnam, Africa, and the Caribbean, with particular attention to themes of cultural hybridity, memory, and diasporic identity.

Britto holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and has received Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus’s highest honor for pedagogy. His research explores how colonial histories shape contemporary narratives in marginalized communities, blending literary analysis with historical and ethnographic methodologies.

His publications include the monograph Disorientation: France, Vietnam, and the Ambivalence of Interculturality (2004) and articles in journals like Representations, French Studies, and Public Books. Recent work examines Vietnamese diasporic fiction’s engagement with Parisian spaces and the representation of colonial trauma in African and Caribbean literatures.

Britto’s writing often critiques colonial legacies through close readings of marginalized voices. His preface to Nguyen Phan Long’s Le Roman de Mademoiselle Lys (2014) exemplifies his commitment to recovering overlooked texts from colonial-era Indochina.

As an educator, Britto emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, guiding students in analyzing literature’s role in shaping cultural memory. His office hours (Wednesdays 3–5 PM) offer students flexible in-person or virtual consultations.