Adrianna Paliyenko joined the French staff in 1989 and has developed a collaborative approach to teaching language, literature and culture at all levels of the curriculum. She regularly integrates technology and draws on the visual arts to make French and Francophone studies come alive for her students. A passion for poetry deepened by the history of ideas on genius and gender and more recently enriched by colonial narratives inspires her scholarship which includes: a book on Rimbaud and Claudel; articles and chapters on 19th-century French psychiatry, Apollinaire and Breton, Paris Dada, Descartes and Lacan, 19th-century poetry by women (Ackermann, Desbordes-Valmore, Krysinska, Siefert, among others), and a critical edition of a 19th-century colonial-themed novel by Anaïs Ségalas. Her most recent publications include The Cultural Currency of Nineteenth-Century French Poetry, a special double issue of Romance Studies co-edited with Joseph Acquisto in which she has an article on Louise Ackermann's poetic turn to science, and a special issue of L'Esprit Créateur, Engendering Race: Romantic-Era Women and French Colonial Memory (2007) to which she contributed an article on Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's belated colonial narrative "Sarah." She is also completing a book-length study, Genius Envy: Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801 - 1900. Future projects include a critical edition of an 1847 novel on abolition by Mme A. Cashin and a major study on the place of women’s writing in the French colonial archive.

Last updated: 9/13/08