I work on premodern literature and history in French, the resurgence of their figures and forms in modern and contemporary cultures. My method: an equal focus on verbal and visual art.
Timely Fictions, the book I’m completing argues for premodern work as the sum total of its various creations in time. It tracks writers and artists engaging with major forms in French-speaking cultures, and the ongoing transformations of such fiction. Composed as an almanach, it presents their arts and sciences for cultivating creative work — and living well — today. The book is supported generously by the Guggenheim Foundation.
Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts and Cultures, was part of a collaborative project, launched to combat the misnomer of a crisis and contribute humanistic thinking and artwork to the debate around migration. Its focus: the cultural history of contact zones where romance languages are spoken. It began as a small installation designed by students and faculty at the Nasher Museum at Duke. It took shape as a collective volume of essays available in print and Open Access.
Medieval Roles for Modern Times is my first essay in this style of historical research. The book tests the case of theater – the aesthetics and politics of mystery plays performed by generations of the Great War and World War II. Awarded a National Humanities Center grant, it’s translated and adapted in French: Un Moyen Âge républicain.
My seminars revolve around debate. I ask students at all levels to develop their critical imagination. We work in French. Students tell me often that adopting another language can free you to express what you’re discovering about the world –and yourselves – in a new way. This debate regularly involves collaborators; in recent years, we’ve worked with fellow-scholars and writers in Paris and Beirut, journalists and human-rights activists in Tunis, artists in Bandjoun and New York.
After hours, I pursue other writing — in family literary history, op-ed pieces on teaching matters French, and North Carolina.
Image: Belleville; photograph by CL Krueger
Home page image: Michael Healy, Seascape