Françoise Lionnet serves as Acting Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, where she is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, and African and African American Studies.
She is Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies at UCLA, and a Research Associate of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
She served as director of the African Studies Center and Program Co-Director of UCLA's Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities: Cultures in Transnational Perspective.
She is a leading scholar in Francophone and comparative literary studies, and has published groundbreaking work in the fields of feminist literature, postcolonial studies, autobiography, and African, African-American, Caribbean and Mascarene Island studies.