Anna was awarded a Hella Mears Graduate Fellowship for Summer 2012 for her dissertation, "Tragedy and the Ethics of Resistance Rights in Early Modern French Theater."
Rob St. Clair (Ph.D. 2011), Assistant Professor at the College of William & Mary interviewed on the Global Voices™ Journal!
http://www.cmedst.umn.edu
From our own Kate Droske, on fellowship at Concordia University for the semester:
in HHHCtr 35
Instructor: Dr. Njeri Githire
From the marvelous resource Fabula, a dossier on recent writings defending literary studies. References span the Atlantic Ocean, from Martha Nussbaum to Yves Citton.
The Division on Seventeenth-Century French Literature of the MLA announces its Calls for Papers for 3 sessions, including a joint round table with the Division on Sixteenth-Century French Literature:
Interested in an intensive academic summer experience? Consider CIEE's program with the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Open to graduate students and undergraduates.
I asked Prof Judith Preckshot about what she's working on right now, and she told me about a fascinating and timely graduate seminar she's preparing for next semester:
This Friday (3/11) UMN's political theory colloquium will host Jill Locke (Political Science and Women's Studies, Gustavus Adolphus College). Jill will briefly present her work "Rousseau, The Misfit's Hero," followed by a longer discussion. The colloquium will be in 1314 Social Sciences at 1:30; coffee will be served.
The paper is at http://www.polisci.umn.edu/centers/theory/schedule.html
If you're in New York this weekend, catch up with our own Dan Brewer at ARTFL's annual conference on the Encyclopédie, this year at Fordham University.
BEND! Photography, Gender, & the Politics of Representation
An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Princeton University, April 22-23, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Professor George Baker, Department of Art History, UCLA
Debarati Sanyal, University of California, Berkeley
Friday, February 18th
4-6pm
Nicholson Hall 125
Quelle mine d'information!
The French and Francophone Studies Dept at Macalester invites you in the context of our lecture series to :
Hollywood, Pirated Videos and Child Soldiers, Dr. Emmanuel Dongala
(or at least using it to procrastinate in an interesting fashion)... Try this experiment from Google Labs:
Read the article by Maury Glover and see the interview on Fox 9 News, Palin's 'Blood Libel' Video Fans Flames:
Doctoral candidate Sylvie Ngilla was in Paris last month and interviewed filmmaker Claire Denis...
Dan Brewer takes time out of his sabbatical to write...
It's the season of dispatches back to the States getting published, so here's one from Paris. It's not in the grand style of Janet Flanner's or Adam Gopnick's gem-like letters in the New Yorker. Nor will Julian Assange be much interested in it. But it carries a sense of this dix-huitiémiste's pleasure, wonderment, and delight at having spent the fall in the City of Light while on sabbatical....
Benjamin Ngong took a few minutes to write us from Dickinson College, where he's an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Contributing Faculty to Africana Studies. Of academic life, he writes:
Life as an Assistant Professor on tenure track is not easy, but I'm trying to make the best out of it.
In fact, it turns out he's been doing quite well...
Klaeber Court, our temporary home during Folwell's remodel, is indeed far far away from Nolte Hall. Thus I was delighted to get an email from Greta Bliss detailing some of her activities as an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. She gave her presentation to colleagues on her dissertation project, (entitled "Untranslating the Maghreb: Reckoning with Gender in Literature and Film from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia") and got useful feedback from fellows in multiple social science and humanities disciplines, which she put to use for a paper she gave last month at the Middle Eastern Studies Conference in San Diego. There she presented on the films A Door to the Sky by Farida Benlyazid and Bedwin Hacker by Nadia El Fani.
She writes:
IAS is a great environment in which to push my working questions further while being "haunted" (in a good way) by an array of methodological approaches and disciplinary concerns. Colleagues doing inspiring work in fields from Geography to Performance Studies have asked strange and stimulating questions, helping me think more extensively about the contours and content of my project--and where I want to go with it.
Working with questions from the different disciplinary angles she's encountered this semester, she'll be finishing up a dissertation chapter, "Narrative as Fault-Line in Maïssa Bey's Surtout ne te retourne pas (2005)" on which she'll also be presenting a paper at the ACLA conference in Vancouver this coming Spring...
Write us again and tell us how it goes, Greta!
Congratulations to Rachel Gibson who received the Annual Carol Urness Student Writing Award from the James Ford Bell Library for her essay "Correspondence from Candia: Venetian Trade in Shifting Waters."
The Department of French and Italian announces a lecture by Andrea Goulet, Associate Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania.
"Derrida Meets the Demon-Baboon: Leroux's Balaoo and the Paleontological Imaginary of Crime"
Tuesday, December 7
4pm, Nicholson 275
Light refreshments will be served.
We had a lovely visit from Vlad Dima (PhD 2010) last week, who's currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the College of William & Mary.
Along with a packed teaching, advising, and service schedule at W&M, Vlad's continued to publish in his area of research, cinematographic sound. Recent articles include Vlad has published on sound issues in Quentin Tarantino's films in "Moviement" (Indicatori sonori in Kill Bill), on Anne Hébert in "Dalhousie French Studies" (Les personnages dans Les Fous de Bassan : la nature de leurs identités). He has two more articles forthcoming in "The Quarterly Review of Film and Video," The Aural Fold and the Sonic Jump-cut: Godard's Baroque Sound, and in "The Journal for Film and Video," Aural Narrative Planes in Djibril-Diop Mambety's Films.
He has also published numerous theatre reviews for Aisle Say, and has contributed to the "Bright Lights Journal" with reviews of A Single Man and Inglourious Basterds.
He is currently working and has submitted articles on Hitchcock, one dealing with the evolution of the murder scene, and the other with connections between Baudelaire's spleen and Hitchcock's Vertigo, as well as a study of the female voice in Seinfeld.
Alumni, send us your news!
Three seminars will be offered in our department next semester. Some seminars in our department require participation in French, others require reading knowledge of French. See below for details...
French 8270: Literature Out of Bounds in Modern and Contemporary France (Prof. Mária Brewer)
French 8410: Storied Identities: Women Writers in Contemporary Quebec (Prof. Eileen Sivert)
French 8120: The Problem of the Fifteenth Century (Prof. Susan Noakes)
The Department of French and Italian announces a lecture by Frieda Ekotto (University of Michigan) entitled: "What is the Color of Blackness?" on Friday, November 19 from 3-5pm in 115 Nicholson Hall.
Light refreshments will be served.
Please join the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota in a discussion with the Director/Producer of the award-winning documentary, Enemies of the People, Thursday, November 11 from 3:30 to 5:00 pm in Room 614 Social Sciences, University of Minnesota.
Enemies of the People Director/Producer Rob Lemkin will join Patricia Hampl, award-winning author and U of Minnesota Regents Professor of Creative Writing, to discuss documenting human rights violations through film and writing. Short clips from the documentary will be shown.
The French and Francophone Studies Department at Macalester College would like to invite you to the French Lecture Series on Monday, November 15 at 4:45 PM in Humanities 401.
Stephanie Cox, Visiting Professor from Carleton College will present "Immigrant Writing in Quebec and Ying Chen"
Francophone Asian-Canadian Writer Ying Chen was born in Shanghai, came to Montreal in the 1990s, and now lives in Vancouver. As the first Chinese writer in Quebec, she attracted attention and her first three novels have been popular in and outside the classroom. Since Quebec society had always identified itself strongly in opposition to the Other, be it the English, the Amerindian, the French and the American, the immigrant gaze reversed its position and inaugurated its role as dominant society. After becoming an icon of Immigrant Writing, Ying Chen made major changes within her writing, thereby risking to lose a portion of her readers but with the aim to avoid the kind of ethnic reading which she felt the categorization of "écritures migrantes" (Immigrant Writing) leads to. Instead of instructing Western readers about the Chinese culture as a cultural ambassador, she invites the reader to meet through the universal experience of exile, whether it be geographic or social.
Stephanie Cox is a Visiting Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Carleton College where she teaches courses on Quebec, Acadia and Louisiana, including "Women of New France" and "Marginality and Renaissance in Francophone North America." She is the author of "La vie probable" a forthcoming study on the writing of Ying Chen. She is the recipient of a Faculty Enrichment Grant from the Canadian Embassy to design a course on "Transnational Writers of Quebec."
The English Department's Nineteenth Century Subfield presents
"Obituaries for Poetry: Dead Poet Love, the Life of the Author, and Photographed Romanticism"
Deidre Shauna Lynch, University of Toronto
Friday, November 19, 2010 at noon
A light lunch will be served
Please join us for a presentation by Deidre Shauna Lynch, the Chancellor Jackman Professor and Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Dr. Lynch is an established literary scholar specializing in eighteenth-century and romantic-era literature with particular interests in women authors and the history and theory of the novel. Her first book, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning was the winner of the 1999 MLA Prize for a First Book.
Co-sponsored with the Department of English, Theorizing Early Modern Studies, the Center for Early Modern History, the Coca Cola Activity Initiative and GAPSA.
symptomatic of the same underlying features of post-graduate life: one is often at a low point in intellectual confidence, one has yet to produce original work, and most importantly, one is new at this. So one either communicates this felt fragility or compensates for it with unmeasured bombast.
If you haven't checked out Gallica recently, the site is worth a look (available in English too!). Check them out on Facebook too, where they recently showcased one of the copies of the L'Ami du Peuple that Marat fell onto after being stabbed by Charlotte Corday...
I am particularly fond of this new widget they've developed that allows visualizations of Gallica documents in other sites. Now that's freedom of information!
Check out some of the works of the 18th-century Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer, considered by many to be the original comic-book artist:
Two new journals in medieval studies, Postmedieval and New Medieval Literatures are both publishing critical review essays. As Postmedieval states,
"Each issue will also feature a book review essay, and unlike most other medieval studies journals, we will not be incorporating reviews of individual books (with, say, five to ten reviews of single titles per issue). Rather, each issue of the journal will include a review essay (of 6,000-8,000 words) that will address a particularly pressing theme or topic within medieval studies and the humanities more broadly, and it will include books that are related to each other within the rubric of this theme or topic. These reviews will include books written by medievalists as well as by scholars in other fields and periods in order to draw for our readership what we see as the very important connections and conjunctions between work in medieval studies and contemporary thought. These reviews will be written by scholars in medieval studies whose work is connected to the theme or topic of the books collectively under review, thereby ensuring a review that will not just remain on the surface of these books, but which will make a critical contribution to the subject(s) addressed in the books under review."
Thanks to Mary Franklin-Brown for the tip!
