Creative and Scholarly Projects: Faculty & Student Research and Collaborations
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Professor Audrey Brunetaux Assistant Professor of French
Audrey Brunetaux’s research focuses on 20th-century French literature with an emphasis on Holocaust
narratives, cinema, and visual arts. Currently, she is completing an article
titled Mise-en-scène, aesthetics, and the Shoah: The Ambiguous Portrayal of
a Female Perpetrator in The Reader that reevaluates our own
conceptions of victimhood and perpetratorship. Through its aesthetics and mise-en-scène,
The Reader becomes a destabilizing narrative in which eroticism,
monstrosity, and victimization collide to challenge the dichotomy of good and
evil. Audrey’s first encounter with the French graphic novel Paroles
d’étoiles has sparked a new interest in visual arts and the representations
of childhood trauma in graphic narratives. One of her articles Childhood, Photography and Comics: Narrating the Shoah in Paroles
D’étoiles explores the relation between text and image in relation to
the Holocaust. Most recently, she has worked on Holocaust survivor Charlotte
Delbo and has written articles that look into Delbo’s rhetorical silence and visuality in her trilogy Auschwitz and
After. She is also interested in the representations of the infamous 1942
“Vel d’Hiv” round-up in visual arts and literature. Professor James Kriesel Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian Professor Kriesel’s interests include medieval and Renaissance Italian culture, medieval literary theory, Neoplatonism, Boccaccio, and Dante. He is completing a book tentatively titled Boccaccio’s Allegory of Literature, in which he explores how Boccaccio develops a new understanding of allegory that allows him to resolve some of the most contentious literary, philosophical, and theological debates of 14th c. Italy. In support of his research, he has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (Italy, 2006-7); he was also named an Edward Sorin Postdoctoral Fellow (University of Notre Dame, 2008-10). He has recently published an article on Boccaccio, allegory, and the history of the Italian language (“The Genealogy of Boccaccio’s Theory of Allegory,” Studi sul Boccaccio), and is currently finishing another article on Boccaccio’s Renaissance reception (“Chastening the corpus: Bembo and the Renaissance Reception of Boccaccio”). Professor Bénédicte Mauguière Professor of French Professor Bénédicte Mauguière's research lies primarily in the area of Francophone, post-colonial, diasporic and transcultural studies. Her publications focus on the literature and aesthetics of North American Francophone cultural production (theatre, film, literature of the "Francophonie des Amériques"), and of the Indian Ocean (Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion). She particularly explores the complex tale of cultural development, colonization, displacement, marginalization, memory and the construction of identity in works of transnational and/or bicultural writers such as J.M.G. Le Clézio, Ananda Devi and Quebecois writer Anne Hébert. Her article “Transgendered Identities in Anne Hébert’s Un Habit de lumière and Almodovar’s All About my Mother" has just been published in Anne Hébert: Essays on her Works (Editions Guernica, 2010). Another article on "Minorisation linguistique et émergence d'un théâtre cadien et franco-américain en français vernaculaire" is forthcoming in a special issue of International Journal of Francophone Studies (University of Leeds, UK) on Francophone North-American Theater. She also recently contributed a chapter respectively on Indo-Mauritian writer Ananda Devi and Malagasy writer Michèle Rakotoson to be published in the Dictionnaire des écritures migrantes en France depuis 1981 (Editions Honoré Champion, Paris). Professor Mouhamédoul Niang Assistant Professor of French Mouhamédoul A. Niang’s research focuses on contemporary Francophone African literature and cinema. His interests also include marronnage, Toussaint Louverture, le roman créoliste, post-colonialstudies and African philosophy. His focus is mainly on the representation of space and the body as they relate to nationalism, tribalism, occultism, gender, sport, medicine, hybridity, pedagogy, transnational migration, and language. The African detective novel features in his work, which deals primarily with authors such as Ahmadou Kourouma, Aminata Sow Fall, Mongo Beti, Sony Labou Tansi, Kossi Effoui, Malika Mokeddem, Fatou Diom, Rachid Mimouni, Bolya Baenga, Calixthe Beyala, and Patrick Chamoiseau. His article Modern Medicine, Excess and Tradition in L’Appel des arènes is forthcoming. This piece investigates the modern medical indoctrination and traditional reclaiming of the body within the Senegalese sociocultural space as depicted in Aminata Sow Fall’s novel. He is completing another article entitled An Onomastic Reading of Ousmane Sembene’s Faat Kine. It will be published in a collective volume on the Senegalese filmmaker. This latest article provides an “onomastic” study of the aforementioned film. His book Crossings Borders: A Reading of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Through Emile Zola’s Germinal (VDM Verlag, 2010) has just been published. He recently completed a review of Medoune Gueye’s book Aminata Sow Fall. Oralité et Société and has several projects in the works. Professor Adrianna Paliyenko Charles A. Dana Professor of French and Department Chair Professor Nicolas Russell Faculty Fellow in French Nicolas Russell’s areas of interest are early modern French literature, cultural history, and intellectual history. Much of his work has focused on the shifting conceptions and roles of memory in early modern culture. His book, Transformations of Memory and Forgetting in Sixteenth-Century France (forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press), argues that writers of the period contributed to a new understanding of human psychology by responding to and reworking ancient and medieval theories and myths about memory. He is currently working on a new book project that will explore the surprising differences between conceptions of collective memory in early modern France and the most recent treatments of collective memory in the social sciences and humanities. |
