My fieldwork cover literature and history in French. I investigate the figurative languages, and thought from around 1400, and the resources they provide to those working in later periods, as today. My method: giving comparable attention to verbal and visual art.
Almanach: A Natural History of Time and Fiction, my book appearing in November 2026, makes a case for works of fiction as the sum total of their various creations in time. It tracks writers and artists engaging with major forms in French-speaking cultures, and the ongoing transformations of such fiction. Through the revolutionary structure of the almanach, it re-introduces a critical model for this historical process of making fiction, and its purpose of cultivating ideas and techniques for people to live well in the cosmos. The book is supported generously by the Guggenheim Foundation.
Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts and Cultures, is the culmination of a collaborative project, launched to combat the misnomer of a crisis and advance humanistic thinking around migration. It concentrates on the cultural history of contact zones where romance languages are spoken. It began as a set of small installations designed by students and faculty at the Nasher Museum and Bostock Library at Duke. It took shape as a collective volume of essays available in print and Open Access.
Medieval Roles for Modern Times is the book in which I began pursuing this mode of research. The book investigates 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 is adapted and translated in French: Un Moyen Âge républicain.
The Master and Minerva, Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture, my first book, contributed to feminist thinking about verbal injury, and legal arguments on defamation, gender, and hate speech.
My seminars offer a forum for various debates. I challenge students at all levels to develop their critical imagination as we discuss issues at stake for the French-speaking world. During the fall semester 2026: the challenges of free expression.
We work in French. Students tell me often that adopting another language can enable 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 enjoyed dialogue with fellow-scholars and writers in Paris and Beirut, journalists and human-rights activists in Tunis, artists in Bandjoun and New York.
Image: Belleville; photograph by CL Krueger
Home page image: Michael Healy, Seascape
