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"

CHRISTINE CLARK-EVANS, Ph.D. (Bryn Mawr University)
Associate Professor of French, Women's Studies, and African and African American Studies
Personal Web Page

THOMAS A. HALE, Ph.D. (University of Rochester)
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature
Head, Department of French and Francophone Studies

I came to Penn State in 1973 to teach African literature. As a co-founder of the African Literature Association in 1974, I co-edited, with Richard K. Priebe (Virginia Commonwealth), two volumes of selected papers, The Teaching of African Literature (1977, 1989), and Artist and Audience: African Literature as a Shared Experience (1979). While a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Niamey, Niger, in 1980-81, I recorded The Epic of Askia Mohammed (1996) which first appeared in a bilingual Songhay-English format in Scribe, Griot, and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire (1990). Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent, an anthology of excerpts from 25 African epics, came out in 1997, co-edited with John Johnson (Indiana) and Stephen Belcher (Penn State). An NEH Fellowship in 1991-92 enabled me to interview 100 bards in Gambia, Senegal, and Mali for Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (1998, 2007).

I am currently working on five books: with Kora Véron (Paris III-La Sorbonne Nouvelle), a completely new version of his first book, Les Ecrits d'Aimé Césaire (1978), tentatively titled "Les Ecrits d'Aimé Césaire: nouvelle bio-bibliographie commentée"; with Aissata Sidikou (Princeton), two volumes on women's songs from West Africa, an anthology of 200 songs and a set of conference papers; with Wendy Belcher (UCLA), an edition of African literary texts written in African languages from 3,000 BCE to 1900; and a critical analysis of francophonie titled "France, Francophonie, and Africa: From the Politics of Culture to the Culture of Politics."