Hannah Freed-Thall

Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture

Hannah Freed-Thall is a specialist of 20th-century French literature and comparative modernisms. Her research and teaching interests include environmental humanities; aesthetic theory and the sociology of culture; queer and feminist theory; and theory of the novel. Before arriving at NYU, she was an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships in the Princeton Society of Fellows and the Brown Pembroke Center. Her first book, Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (NY: Oxford, 2015) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies and the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book. Her second book, Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons, was published by Columbia University Press in 2023. 

Education

Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
B.A., Smith College

Fellowships and Honors

  • 2017 William A. Dyer, Jr. Assistant Professor of Humanities, Brown University
  • 2016 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies
  • 2016 Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book
  • 2014-15 Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown Pembroke Seminar, "Aesthetics and the Question of Beauty,"
  • 2013 Malcolm Bowie Prize (for the best article in any area of French studies by an early career researcher)
  • 2011-2014 Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship, Princeton Society of Fellows

Publications

Book:

Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Columbia University Press, Modernist Latitudes series, 2023)

Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (New York: Oxford UP, 2015; paperback 2018).


Articles and Book Chapters:

“Proust on the Beach.” Paragraph 45.1 (March 2022).

Introduction to co-edited issue of Comparative Literature, “Beaches & Ports,” June 2021. 

“Suspicion and Novelty: The Nouveau Roman.” In The Cambridge History of the Novel in French, ed. Adam Watt (2021). 

“Thinking Small: Ecologies of Close Reading.” In Modernism and Close Reading, ed. David James (Oxford UP., 2020). 

“L’Effet de plage.” Bulletin Marcel Proust (2019).

“Le monde relancé à chaque phrase’: Entretien avec Maylis de Kerangal.” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: SITES (with Thangam Ravindranathan, 2019).

“Heartsick: The Language of French Disgust.” Modern Language Quarterly 79.5 

“Adventures in Structuralist Narrative Theory: Reading with Barthes and Genette.” Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by Matthew Garrett (June 2018).

“Speculative Modernism: Proust and the Stock Market.” Modernist Cultures 12.2 (July 2017): 153-172.

“‘Prestige of a Momentary Diamond’: Economies of Distinction in Proust.” New Literary History 43.1 (Winter, 2012): 159-178.

“‘Zut, zut, zut, zut’: Aesthetic Disorientation in Proust.” MLN 124.4 (September 2009): 868-900.

“‘Une Répugnante Complicité’: Figuring History in Le Planétarium.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 10.2 (April 2006): 173-181.
 

Edited Journal Issues:

“Proust to Other Ends” (with François Proulx), l'esprit créateur

“Beaches & Ports” (with Morgane Cadieu), Comparative Literature 73.2

“Sous les pavés” (with Thangam Ravindranathan), Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES (2019).

“Modernist Setting” (with Dora Zhang), Modernism/modernity Print Plus (2018)

 

Reviews:

Review of Stephanie Posthumus’s French Écocritique. CHOICE (June 2018).

“Stranger Tongues.” Review of Barry McCrea’s Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 50.1. (May 2017): 137-140.

Review of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Weather in Proust. MLN 128.4 (September 2013): 964-965.