If we could today—without the burden or benefit of precedent, tradition, or institutional inertia—invent a field called ‘French and Francophone Studies,’ what would it look like?
– Laurent Dubois & Achille Mbembe
Cynthia Nazarian
Assistant Professor of French at Northwestern University
Cynthia Nazarian's research explores figurations of violence in early modern French, English and Italian literature, analyzing the rhetorics of suffering and brutality that shape the politics of the early modern Self and State. She is the author of Love’s Wounds: Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2016).
Chelsea Stieber
Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the Catholic University of America
Chelsea Stieber is a specialist of Haitian literature. Her current book project, Haiti’s Paper War, proposes a new, decentralized paradigm to Haitian literary history. It focuses on local and regional expressions, as well as on myths and disavowal, rather than on comprehensive or “national” memories of the past.
Respondent: Claire Reising, NYU
Chair: Cécile Bishop, NYU
In English
Future meetings will take place on November 2, February 1, and March 19.
Sponsored by the Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture and the Institute of French Studies