Andrea Jonsson

Andrea Jonsson is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and the Director of the Voice+ Research Lab in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech. She also co-leads the Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS) Study Abroad program at Georgia Tech Europe (2024, 2028) and the Language, Environment, and Arts in France (LEAF) summer study abroad program (2025, 2027, 2029 summers).

She received a Bachelor of Music from McGill University and a PhD in French from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research traces connections between voice, gender, and affect in contemporary culture, literature, music, and media.

In her research in Interdisciplinary Voice and Performance Studies, she focuses primarily on the way women’s voices afford productive ways to rethink hegemonies of language. Dr. Jonsson has several recent publications on media, humor, transgressive graphic narratives, popular music, and performance art. Her co-authored book with Heather Warren-Crow (2021, The University of Minnesota Press-Forerunners Series) is entitled Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun and examines recent performative responses to the 2001 political pamphlet Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by the semi-anonymous group Tiqqun. Examples of Dr. Jonsson's interdisciplinary methodology can be seen in two recent publications, the first is in Modern and Contemporary France—“Graver le son de l’écriture slam: la voix banlieusarde urbatextuelle dans l’oeuvre de Grand Corps Malade,” in which she focuses on geopoetic textuality and the particularities of sonority in slam poetry—especially within the connection between sound and materiality in French slam artist Grand Corps Malade’s first album Midi 20 (2006). In 2016 she was awarded a Humanities Center Fellowship that permitted her to initiate a new field of research that applies her background in music and her research in voice studies. In this vein, Dr. Jonsson has established a methodology that proposes a musico-cultural analysis of expressions of vulnerability in the connections between musical interval, linguistic texture, and language. Her article “From Interval, to Trill, to Undulation: Expressions of Vulnerability in the Melismatic Intervals of Jacques Brel and Stromae” in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites “Le sens médiatisé,” (Winter 2018) applies this methodolgy to the voices of Belgian artists Stromae (b. 1985) and Jacques Brel (1929-78). More recently Under the Plastic Ga(u)ze: Voice, Race and Corporeality in Yseult offers a fresh perspective on how listeners engage with Yseult’s music through timbre, emphasizing the interplay of sound, image and identity in her works. 

The rest of Dr. Jonsson's research is more firmly set in Women’s, Gender, and Affect studies. Her work serves as a resource to interdisciplinary scholars, for example in her chapter "The Reach of Excess through the Prism of Voice-Affect-Gender" in the Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, edited by Todd W. Reeser and a forthcoming chapter “Taches féminines: Feminist Fertilization and the Power of the Menstrual Stain in Contemporary Bandes dessinées” in Women in Power in French and Francophone Cultures and Societies. She has forthcoming articles on contemporary vocal artists such as Camille and Zaho de Sagazan that build on her current book project Amplified Intimacy: Voicing French Feminisms in Contemporary Pop Culture, which examines ways women use vocal intimacy to redefine soundscapes historically dominated by men in music, comedy, podcasts, performance, and immersive media (under contract with Liverpool University Press).

An award-winning teacher, Dr. Jonsson has created courses that examine the connections between popular culture and critical theory. Her courses focus on professor-structured but student-led discussion, debate, and research.

Courses:

• Intercultural Seminar (FREN 4500/6500)
• Survey of French Literature (FREN 3000)
• French Art: Performance Art (FREN 4011/6011)
• Drama Workshop (FREN 3004)
• Introduction to French Philosophy (FREN 4200/8803)
• French in Song: from Phonograph to Music Video (FREN 4813/8803)
• Contemporary France (FREN 3014)
• Food, Arts, Media (FREN 4089/6089)
• Advanced Composition: Image, Music, Text (FREN 3121)
• Contemporary French Culture (FREN 2002)
• Introduction to 20th and 21st-Century French Literature: Spaces, Places (FREN 3002)