Conversations With People Who Read Montaigne: Valérie Dionne

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*In French*

This event is open to all on Zoom, register HERE

The Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture, the Medieval and Renaissance Center (MARC), and the Maison Française of New York University are pleased to announce Conversations With People Who Read Montaigne. This new online series features discussions with scholars, writers, philosophers, artists, and others from around the world who read and have something to say about the Essais, Michel de Montaigne’s thousand-page open exploration of topics ranging from the use of thumbs to the ravages of colonial exploration. In each episode, Phillip John Usher will be joined virtually or in-person by a guest speaker who will first answer a Montaigne Questionnaire, before discussing their own work on, about, or inspired by Montaigne. A live Q&A will follow.

There will be no one school of thought, but an exploration of the various ways that the Essais might be read in the twenty-first century. All episodes will subsequently be made available on the Maison’s Youtube site, to form progressively an anthology of perspectives on the inventor of the essay genre.

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Valérie M. Dionne
dionne

Valérie M. Dionne is an associate professor of French and the director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights at Colby College. After studying in Montreal, London, Paris, and Fribourg, she earned her PhD from Princeton University. Her research examines the correlation of poetics, rights, and ethics in Early Modern French Literature. Recently she has focused on confronting western philosophies, to engage further in decolonial thinking.

Her multidisciplinary approach to the Early Modern period allows her to explore topics that range from gender theory to political philosophy. Her major publications include: Montaigne, écrivain de la conciliation (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014); Staging Justice in Early Modern France, a volume she co-edited with Michael Meere for the journal Early Modern French Studies, 2020; and another volume Revelations of Character: Ethos, Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy in Montaigne (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) co-edited with Corinne Noirot. She has also authored numerous articles, including “Justice and Law” in the Oxford Handbook to Montaigne (2016), and on the rights of intersex people in France from antiquity to the present. Her current book project focuses on the myths of Iphigenia, Antigone, and Medea, and other figures of revolt reinterpreted in French tragedies.