Sonia Assa received her License ès Lettres from the University of Paris-Nanterre and her Ph.D. from New York University. She is an Associate Professor at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury, where she teaches French and Spanish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She lectures and writes on French and Francophone women writers and filmmakers.
Elissa Rhaïs’s novels and short stories, set in her native Algeria, were a great success among readers of the années folles of the 1920s and were praised by critics who admired her acute perception of the Muslim soul. She portrayed the lives of passionate and independent North African women, breaking the prevailing stereotypes of the colonial times.
