Dr. Alexandra K. Natoli

Dr. Alexandra Natoli is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Southern Indiana. She received her BA in French and in Russian and Central European Studies from Syracuse University and her Masters and PhD in French from the University of Virginia. 

Dr. Natoli's research focuses on the history and memory of the Holocaust and Occupation in France. In 2019, she was honored to have been chosen at the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. During the tenure of her fellowship, Dr. Natoli conducted research on a current book project entitled Bodily Matters: Remembering Outhouse Space in the Nazi Camps. Focusing primarily on Auschwitz-Birkenau, her research examines the complex ways survivors of the Nazi death camps evoke outhouse spaces in both written and oral testimony, as spaces instrumental in both helping and hindering their daily survival. This project was born from the seeds of her doctoral dissertation. Entitled Muscle Memory: Rethinking the Scatological in French Visions of Deportation, her doctoral research analyzed French survivors’ complex foregrounding of their relationship to excreta in accounts of the Nazi camps, and the reappropriation of this emphasis in a broader corpus of French Holocaust fiction

Before coming to USI, Dr. Natoli held positions teaching French at Alfred University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia. She additionally taught French in the Charlottesville, Va. community at the Alliance Française de Charlottesville and taught English at the Université Paris-Est Créteil. 

Dr. Natoli teaches all levels of French language, literature, and culture, from beginning and intermediate language courses to film, literature, civilization, and phonetics seminars. 

When she is not in the classroom or her office, Dr. Natoli is passionate about cooking, travelling, indoor cycling, and Polish language and culture. 

Fall 2023 Office Hours: M 2:00-3:00; W 9:00-10:00 and by appointment -- please e-mail!