MARC AUTHIER, Ph.D. (University of Southern California)
Associate Professor of French and Linguistics
Personal Web Page | Selected Publications

My primary area of research is syntactic theory with special reference to French constructs. I also have secondary interests in formal semantics and mathematical logic. I have worked extensively on reference, quantification and causation and their structural correlates in the Romance and Germanic languages.

I teach a variety of courses in linguistics and French linguistics including FR 316 (French Linguistics), LING 402 (syntax), FR 418 (French syntax), LING 500 (syntax I), and FR 504/SPAN 511 (Romance syntax).

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

I trained as a historian of modern France with a particular focus on contact between the mainland and colonies in West Africa, the Caribbean and North Africa through questions of race, gender (including feminism and masculinity), imperialism and colonialism. My book manuscript, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris,is forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press in 2010. It considers Paris as a colonial space in which black and white, both men and women, explored what it meant to live in the capital of an imperial nation-state between the two world wars. In my research, I look at ties among early anti-imperialists and feminists, using their newspapers and literature, as well as police archives, to study the impact that the vogue nègre had upon the politics and culture of race and gender in France. Articles on these themes include "In Black and White: Gender, Race Relations and the Nardal Sisters in Interwar Paris" in French Colonial History and “Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race in the Late Third Republic” in French Politics, Culture & Society.I have used my research interests to develop courses at Penn State in which undergraduates and graduate students are invited to expand upon their own understandings 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"; FR597: “France and the Colonies.”

PIERRE CINTAS, Ph.D. (Indiana University)
Associate Professor of French: Penn State — Abington
Personal Web Page

CHRISTINE CLARK-EVANS, Ph.D. (Bryn Mawr University)
Associate Professor of French, Women's Studies, and African and African American Studies
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KATHRYN M. GROSSMAN, Ph.D. (Yale University)
Professor of French
Personal Web Page | Selected Publications

Fields: Nineteenth-century French novel; Victor Hugo studies; utopian studies; popularized versions of literary classics.

I am a nineteenth-century literary scholar, with particular interests in Victor Hugo's novels and other utopian, visionary, and/or poetic prose fiction. My work has explored politics and poetics in Hugo and other post-Revolutionary writers, including George Sand, George Orwell, and Eugene Zamiatin; the appropriation of literary classics by other media; approaches to teaching language and literature; and Hugo's dialogues with other writers from William Shakespeare to Charles Dickens. My first book (Droz, 1986) focused on Hugo's elaboration of the romantic novel, in early works like Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné and Notre-Dame de Paris, as a fertile mélange des genres that reflects a poetics of harmony. My second book (SIUP, 1994) considered his prose masterwork, Les Misérables, as a completely integrated metaphorical system that demonstrates a radical new poetics of transcendence. A third book (Twayne,1996), also on Les Misérables, is aimed at a more popular audience. I am currently completing a monograph on the intricate fractal patterns in the last three novels of Hugo's maturity - Les Travailleurs de la mer, L'Homme qui rit, and Quatre-vingt-treize. In addition, I have begun a book-length study of the novelist's relations with such literary interlocutors as Sir Walter Scott, Claire de Duras, George Sand, Charles Dickens, and Émile Zola in order to show how these exchanges helped to establish popular new modes of fiction for an ever-expanding readership in the nineteenth century.

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

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 my 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."

NORRIS J. LACY, Ph.D. (Indiana University)
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of French and Medieval Studies
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My major interests interests include medieval narrative (especially romance and fabliau), though I have also worked extensively on Villon's poetry and a variety of other subjects. Primarily, however, I specialize in the Arthurian legend, across periods—from the beginnings to the present—and across languages and disciplines, from literature to painting, film, and popular culture. My first single-authored book was The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes, and I co-authored The Arthurian Handbook with Geoffrey Ashe. In addition to preparing several critical editions of medieval and later texts, I served as editor of The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, of the first full translation of the Lancelot-Grail (i.e., Vulgate Cycle) and the Post-Vulgate, and of a number of other volumes. Among the recent collections I have edited are A History of Arthurian Scholarship. A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes (co-edited), and The Grail, the Quest and the World of Arthur. In my research on Arthuriana, I began by examining the structure or "architecture" of romances, and my focus gradually shifted to a consideration of the narrator's method and voice and, more recently, to the function of the numerous and nearly systematic discontinuities and inconsistencies that make Arthurian subjects the endlessly fascinating creations they are. The appeal of shorter narrative (fabliaux in particular) led me to publish Reading Fabliaux and a number of related articles and to co-edit The Old French Fabliaux: Essays on Comedy and Context. My interest in these works extends from a close examination of the language and composition of texts to a study of their cultural and historical context.

Recent Courses and Seminars: Paris in the Middle Ages; Court and Castle; Gender Issues in Medieval Literature; Medieval Comedy, Parody, and Irony; Old French (language); The World of King Arthur; Chrétien de Troyes and Medieval Romance; Epic and Romance.

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

HEATHER MCCOY, Ph.D. (Brown University)
French and Francophone Studies Basic Language Program Director

I am the Director of the Basic Language Program, meaning that I develop and implement the curriculum as well as supervise and mentor the Graduate Teaching Assistants while they teach French 1, 2 and 3.  I am also the study abroad adviser for undergraduate students interested in studying in a French-speaking countries.

My primary interests are the use of multimedia and technology in the French classroom and 1960s French cinema.  Classes that I teach on a regular basis include French 138 (French Culture though Film), French 202 (Grammar and Composition) and French 440/581 (Theory and Techniques of Teaching French).

BÉNÉDICTE MONICAT, Ph.D. (University of Maryland)
Professor of French and Women's Studies
Head, Department of French and Francophone Studies
Selected Publications

Fields: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, Travel Narratives, Children's Literature, Feminist Theory

My research focuses on women's writings in Nineteenth-Century France, with an emphasis on the questions that arise when examining gender through the lens of literary genres. My readings of travel narratives, children's literature, and instructional books combine literary history and genre analysis to think through patterns of gender constraints and disruptions in women's writings. Through extensive bibliographical work, I also aim to illuminate the rich creative and intellectual areas women legitimately did make theirs. This wide-ranging exploration of women's active participation in the literary and intellectual life of the nation wants to account for and provide an analysis of women's relation to creativity and knowledge production in contexts that prove critical not only to our understanding of women's writings throughout the period, but also to contemporary theoretical reflections (feminist theories more particularly).

Emblematic Courses
In Women's Studies: Introduction to Women in the Arts and Humanities, International     Perspectives on Women's Writings, Feminist Theory.
In French: Figures of Exoticism in 19th-century France, Genre and Gender Issues in
    19th-century Women's writings, Histoire(s) de(s) femmes.

LISA A. REED, Ph.D. (Université d'Ottawa)
Associate Professor of French and Linguistics
Personal Web Page | Selected Publications

Fields: Linguistics (Syntax and Semantics)

My research focuses on two areas of theoretical linguistics: syntax and semantics, with a particular interest in representations of the interface between these two modules in terms of the generative and model-theoretic frameworks. I have worked in depth on the syntax and semantics of modal verbs, causative constructions, affected datives, raising constructions, ergatives, and middles, among others.

I teach a wide variety of courses in French linguistics, such as FR 316/502 French Linguistics, FR 418/504 French Syntax, and FR 505 French Semantics, in addition to offering a range of similar courses in English for the Linguistic Program (LING).

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.

ALLAN STOEKL, Ph.D. (SUNY at Buffalo)
Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Fields: Twentieth Century continental French literature and intellectual history; comparative literature with an emphasis on politics and economics in the twentieth century; French film, especially in its relations with contemporaneous critical and philosophical theory; energy and social space from a global economic and political perspective.

My recent work has focused on Georges Bataille's theories of energy and religion; I read Bataille not only as a major figure in intellectual history but as a map-no doubt questionable and incomplete-for understanding the vicissitudes of energy and religious "experience" in the coming years (Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability [University of Minnesota Press, 2007]). Future work will focus on the figure of the gleaner, both as an economic and cultural figure in an era of depletion, and as a "subject" in the context of a philosophy oriented around the primacy-and entropy-of energy inputs. I'm also writing a book on French film that situates certain major French film makers (most notably Epstein, Bunuel, Renoir, Bresson, Truffaut, Godard and Varda) in relation to the film criticism and philosophy of their eras.

Other books I've written: Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992). I also edited an anthology of writings on Georges Bataille, titled, logically enough, On Bataille (Yale French Studies 78, 1990).

Over the years I have translated a number of works, by Georges Bataille (Visions of Excess: Writings, 1927-39 [University of Minnesota Press, 1985]); Maurice Blanchot (The Most High [University of Nebraska Press, 1996]); and Paul Fournel (Need for the Bike [University of Nebraska Press, 2003]).

Courses taught: Modern and contemporary French literature and film on the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels (French 460, 570, 572); French film history and criticism (French 487 and 488); Oil politics and economics from an international perspective (International Studies 493).

JEAN-CLAUDE VUILLEMIN, Ph.D. (Michigan State University)
Professor of French

Fields: 17th-Century French Literature and Philosophy; Post-structuralism and Reception theories; Baroque Aesthetics; Semiotics of Drama and Theater Theory; Intellectual History

Associated to several research institutes in France (Paris-8; CNRS; CELLF 17e-18e /Sorbonne), I lecture on both sides of the Atlantic. Inspired by the Foucaldian notion of épistémè, I challenge the ideological perception of a baroqueless France and restore the pertinence of the baroque notion as a heuristic concept to be applied not only to architecture and visual arts, but also to literature, philosophy, and intellectual history. Although it may be argued that a major methodological interest of the baroque hypothesis lies in its very imprecision, my next book, Pertinence épistémologique d'un concept esthétique, will provide a new theory for a notion which explains best the epistemological breakdown Europe experienced in the last quarter of the 16th century. As a conceptual framework in which poetics, politics, and epistemology interact, my baroque is much less aesthetic than deeply philosophical.

While collaborating to the first critical edition of Jean Rotrou's complete theater (Belles-Lettres / Sorbonne-Paris-4) and to the first Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century French Philosopher s (Thoemmes Press / CNRS), I pursue research on pragmatics of theatrical communication, play reception, and metatheatricality. In addition to a book on Rotrou (Baroquisme et théâtralité) and three critical editions of his plays (L'Hypocondriaque ; L'Innocente Infidélité ; La Belle Alphrède), I have authored many articles and reviews, and I serve on the editorial board for one monograph series, Biblio 17, and two journals: Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature and Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre.

I very much enjoy the Sea, the Sun, the Festival d'Avignon, selected Parisian cafés, le Champagne, le Luxembourg (jardin du), fine restaurants (which make playing squash mandatory), the "Rolling Stones", and, last but certainly not least, le Théâtre. Believe it or not, I also concur with Pascal in claiming the hatefulness of the Moi. Moi ?

Graduate Seminars: FR 571. Literary Theory and Criticism; FR 535. Texts and Performances: Theories of Drama; FR 534. 17th -Century French Drama: Theories and Practices; FR 533. Baroque Aesthetics. 17th -Century French Literature and Intellectual History; FR 545-A: Analysis of French Civilization

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, Fall 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.

MEREDITH DORAN, Ph.D. (Cornell University)
Assistant Professor of French and Applied Linguistics
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CELESTE KINGINGER, Ph.D. (University of Illinois)
Associate Professor of French and Applied Linguistics

I am a specialist in language learning and teaching, dividing my time between the Department of Applied Linguistics and the Department of French and Francophone studies. My research is about the qualities of language learning experiences and environments, and has included projects on classroom discourse, teacher education, computer-mediated intercultural exchanges, life histories of multilinguals, and study abroad. Most recently, my work has involved directing a project on language learning and study abroad within CALPER (the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research), a National Foreign Language Resource Center here at Penn State. I am active in the American Association for Applied Linguistics, and publish my work in journals such as Language Learning, Foreign Language Annals, and Applied Linguistics. In connection with my CALPER projects, I have authored two forthcoming books: Language Learning in Study Abroad: Case Studies of Americans in France (Modern Language Journal Monograph Series, Volume One, 2008), and Language Learning and Study Abroad: A Critical Reading of Research (Palgrave/ MacMillan, 2009).

Courses: Teaching French, Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Narrative Study in Applied Linguistics, Language Program Design and Direction