Our distinguished scholars and critics have received numerous honors, prizes, and fellowships, including appointment to Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. Our publications and courses cover a wide range of topics in all periods of French and Francophone literature and culture.
Our Professorial Faculty in French
Jennifer Cazenave
Research Interests Transnational cinema, nonfiction film, archive and memory studies, contemporary French civilization and culture, Holocaust and genocide studies, feminist theory, and the Anthropocene.
Selected Publications An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”
Odile Cazenave
Research Interests Odile Cazenave’s research interests focus on the impact of age, gender and location on the writing and reception of postcolonial literary and filmic narratives in French.
Selected Publications Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment; Afrique sur Seine; Femmes rebelles Naissance d’un nouveau roman africain au féminin
Irit Ruth Kleiman
Research Interests Historiography, law and literature, intellectual history, the cultures of memory, Mediterranean studies, the material turn, history of the senses, psychoanalysis and literature, and the tropes of embodiment.
Selected Publications Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe; Philippe de Commynes: Memory, Betrayal, Text
Rachel Mesch
Research Interests Nineteenth century France with a focus on the fin de siècle and Belle Epoque, gender, feminism, trans identities, queer history, history of media and popular culture, the mass press, photography.
Selected Publications Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France; Having it All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman; The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle