Civilization Faculty - Department of French and Francophone Studies

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Civilization

Jennifer Boittin | Vera Mark | Willa Z. Silverman | Monique Yaari

JENNIFER BOITTIN, Ph.D. (Yale University)
Assistant Professor of French, Francophone Studies, and History
Josephine Berry Weiss Early Career Professor in the Humanities

Fields: Modern French, European and Colonial history

My training as a historian of modern France, with a particular focus on questions of race, gender, imperialism and colonialism, has led me to work on a book manuscript on Paris as a colonial space in which black and white, men and women explored what it meant to live in the capital of an imperial nation-state between the two world wars. My research has led me to look at ties among early anti-imperialists and feminists through their newspapers, and with the help of police archives, and to study the impact that the vogue nègre had upon the politics and culture of race and gender. Through a focus upon individuals such as Josephine Baker and the Martinican Nardal sisters, some of these connections are revealed in my article in French Colonial History entitled "In Black and White: Gender, Race Relations and the Nardal Sisters in Interwar Paris." I have also used my current research interests to develop a number of courses at Penn State in which undergraduates and graduate students are invited to expand upon their own understanding of the links among France, her colonies and broader European or worldwide historical contexts from the eighteenth century, or earlier, to the present.

Courses
Undergraduate: FR137: "Paris: Anatomy of a City"; FR410: "French Press and Media";
    FR497/HIST497: "Colonial Encounters: France and Empire, 1750 - present";
    FR497/HIST497: "The Other Citizens: Slavery, Race, Gender and the Making of Modern
    France."
Graduate: FR580: "Approaches to French Civilization"; FR/CMLIT 597: "Black Paris"

jab808@psu.edu

vxm3@psu.edu

VERA MARK, Ph.D. (University of Texas - Austin)
Assistant Professor of French, Francophone Studies and Linguistics
Selected Publications | Abbreviated CV

Fields: Popular and Media Cultures; War, Violence, Memory; French Anthropology/Anthropology of France ; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Everyday Life

I am an anthropologist of contemporary France. I am interested in how multiple layers of French and Francophone identity (local/regional/national/global) are represented and constructed by a range of popular culture forms. My published articles and book chapters have examined representation of self in World War Two print dialect poetry, the gendered narrative strategies of liars' tales told in an ethnic festival and the recasting of regional language and culture in hybridized music lyrics. This work reflects my initial training in linguistic anthropology and folklore (and included study in these fields at the Universities of Bordeaux and Toulouse), with a focus on the interrelations of aesthetic form and social function in text and performance.

I have conducted over two decades of ethnographic and historical archival research on local memories of the World War Two period in Lectoure, a small town in rural southwestern France, funded by grants from the French Ministry of Culture and the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities. My current research on legal dossiers dating from 1944-1945 purge trials has turned to the ethics of self-representation by collaborators. Ideology is read ethnographically through the subtle, and often invisible, practices of everyday life. I am engaged in two manuscript-length projects from this research, drawing from private, departmental and national archives.

Selected Courses
Undergraduate: Contemporary France; War and Violence
Graduate: Approaches to French Civilization; French Regions and Regionalisms; French
Popular Culture

wzs1@psu.edu

WILLA Z. SILVERMAN, Ph.D. (New York University)
Professor of French and Jewish Studies

My research focuses on the social and cultural history of France from approximately 1880 to 1914. My first book, The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France, relies on biography as a privileged genre for research in interdisciplinary French Studies. Through an examination of the life of the prolific popular novelist, anti-Semitic propagandist, and salonnière, Gyp, I attempted to elucidate many of the social and political tensions in fin-de-siècle France. My discovery of a trove of correspondence between Gyp and her publishers led me to a new teaching and research field, book history and print culture studies. In my second book, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880-1914, I take my work in book history in the direction of esthetics. Taking as a point of departure the cult-like love of luxury books by a new cadre of upper-bourgeois bibliophiles during a uniquely artistic (and materialistic) era, I analyze subjects as diverse as the relationship between book collecting and esthetic and cultural currents such as Symbolism, dandyism, and Art Nouveau; the gendered nature of book collecting; and the increased collaboration between authors and illustrators. My current book project is an edition of the unpublished private diaries of Henri Vever, a prominent Art Nouveau jeweler, Asian art collector, and Parisian man about town. I aim to reestablish Vever as an important figure in his own right and to rely on his life as a prism through which to view the myriad topics it illuminates in the history of the turn of the century: daily and private life; the 1900 Paris World's Fair; the milieu of Asian art collectors; reactions of private citizens to contemporary events such as the Dreyfus Affair.

My teaching assignments range from first-year seminars to graduate courses in the Department of French and Francophone Studies (La Belle Époque; Decadence; Paris 1900; History of the Book in France; French civilization survey courses), the Jewish Studies program (France and the Holocaust in Film and Literature), and the International Studies major (international human rights). On a personal note, I am a native New Yorker who loves cities, travel, cooking, singing, and antiquing.

MONIQUE YAARI, Ph.D. (University of Cincinnati)
Associate Professor of French

Trained in French literature with a focus in 20th-century prose and theory, my recent research and teaching have been grounded in cultural analysis (informed by cultural history), with a primary focus on the contemporary French city and secondary foci on the plastic arts and the culture of display. Across these fields and topics, I pursue an interest in modernism, postmodernism, the historical avant-gardes, inter-arts discourse, and representations of self and of local/national identity.

I have directed eight Ph.D. dissertations on topics ranging from the French Revolution bicentennial parade to the radios libres, and from Jean Cocteau to contemporary French parks. Four of my students have been awarded prestigious dissertation fellowships (Chateaubriand, Fulbright, and Edouard Morot-Sir).

My first book, Ironie paradoxale et ironie poétique: vers une théorie de l'ironie moderne sur les traces de Gide dans Paludes (Summa, 1988), blended theory of irony with analyses of the Gidean theory and practice of narrative. I continued this inquiry into the question of irony with articles such as "Ironic Architecture: The Puzzles of Multiple Encoding" (1990) and "Ironies of Modern/Postmodern Art: Duchamp, Magritte, Adami" (1995). I have then continued working on contemporary plastic arts, addressing among others the question of self-portraiture: "Who/What Is the Subject? Representations of Self in Late Twentieth-Century French Art" (2000).

Turning more and more toward cultural analysis, I've attempted to theorize a French, or Continental, version of cultural studies, most clearly defined in an article titled, "Toward a Graduate Cultural Curriculum: The Case of French" (2002).

My second book, Rethinking the French City : Architecture, Dwelling, and Display after 1968 (Rodopi, spring 2008), for the research of which I received a Fulbright Senior Research Award in Paris, is a study of image construction, cultural policies, and social issues in post-68 urban France. Earlier articles on related topics include " Belle ville , Bellevilleuse : Reading Belleville, Reading the City Today" (2002); "La ville comme objet de communication: Montpellier et Lille" (2002); and "La Ville, le Centre et l'après-moderne" (2007).

A subject I have long been working on has now moved to the fore, becoming my current sabbatical project: Romanian surrealism of French expression. Having worked so far on early and late 20th century, through this project I will be turning to the cultural context of the 1930s and 40s, and also broaching the question of cultural and linguistic hybridity.

mxy2@psu.edu