Nathalie Buchet Ritchey
The French
Department is deeply saddened
by the loss of Nathalie Buchet Ritchey.
She is sorely missed and will long be remembered.
[Read the obituary in the Boston Globe]
Hélène Bilis
Hélène Bilis specializes in the literature and culture of early modern France. She is particularly interested in the relationship between seventeenth-century theater and contemporary political discourses on sovereignty. Her current research addresses representations of feeble kings and crises of dynastic succession on the tragic stage. Other areas of focus include the historiography of the “Grand Siècle,” generic intersections of comedy and tragedy, and early modern rewritings of ancient texts. In the classroom, she uses the insights of visual arts, ceremonial fictions, juridical and political writings to contextualize and enlighten literary texts.
Venita Datta
129C Green Hall
781-283-2414
vdatta@wellesley.edu
A specialist of nineteenth- and twentieth- century French cultural and intellectual history, Vinni Datta is especially interested in the relationship of politics and culture, particularly in the formation of national identity. She is the author of Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (1999), and is currently working on a book-length manuscript tentatively titled Legends, Heroes, and Superwomen: Causes Célèbres and National Identity in Belle-Epoque France. Professor Datta teaches a variety of courses in cultural history, among them French 349: La Belle Epoque: Politics, Society, and Culture, French 229: America Through French Eyes: Perspectives and Realities, as well as French 207, the introductory course in French Cultural Studies.
Sylvaine Egron-Sparrow
129B Green Hall
781-283-2415
segronsp@wellesley.edu
Sylvaine Egron-Sparrow specializes in French civilization and conversation courses. Her areas of interest cover contemporary novels, analysis of films from immigrant filmmakers, and novels from African writers. She has been Director and also Associate Director for the Wellesley-in-Aix program. Professor Egron-Sparrow is the Director of the French House in 2007-08.
Anne Gillain
231 Green Hall
781-283-2411
agillain@wellesley.edu
Director, Wellesley-in-Aix, 2007-2008
Audiovisual materials play an important part in Anne Gillain's teaching. In conversation courses, she makes extensive use of advertisements, films and programs taped from French television. She has also introduced courses on cinema and film theory. Professor Gillain has published: Contemporary French Novelists (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1988), a textbook on recent fiction in France; Le Cinéma selon François Truffaut (Flammarion, 1988), a collection of the director's interviews; François Truffaut: Le Secret perdu (Hatier, 1991), a study of narrative and meaning in the films of François Truffaut and two monographies: one on Truffaut's first film, The 400 Blows (Nathan, 1991) and another on Woody Allen's film Manhattan (Nathan 1997). She has also published articles on French women directors, in particular, Catherine Breillat and Brigitte Rouän. She is currently working on a book on cinema and psychoanalysis.
Scott Gunther
229B Green Hall
781-283-2444
sgunther@wellesley.edu
Homepage
Scott Gunther is a specialist of contemporary French Culture and society. His interests include the mass media, gender and sexuality, Franco-American relations, Franco-German relations and comparative (French/American) law. He teaches from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, relying on the contributions of disciplines as diverse as law, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology, history, sociology, and cultural studies. He has published articles on gay politics in France and on French popular media. Gunther's book, The Elastic Closet: Legal Control and Self-Control of Homosexuals in France (forthcoming, January 2009) examines gay politics in contemporary France with a focus on the complex relationship between French republican values and the possibilities they offer for social change. His newest project, Françallemagne: Imagining a New Community for Old Europe, examines the strengthening of ties between France and Germany in recent years and the efforts being made to encourage these two populations to imagine themselves not so much as French or German but as "Franco-German."
Andrea Levitt
137 Green Hall
781-283-2410
alevitt@wellesley.edu
Department Chair
Andrea Levitt teaches a variety of linguistics courses, including introductory linguistics and phonetics and phonology as well as courses on sociolinguistics, the spoken and written word, and bilingualism. Professor Levitt has published numerous articles on speech perception and production in children and adults. She is also interested in the acquisition of speech sounds and native-like prosody by second-language learners. Both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NATO have provided support for her work. Professor Levitt is a visiting researcher at Yale University's Haskins Laboratories, a center for the study of speech and reading. She frequently involves Wellesley students as assistants in ongoing projects at Haskins Labs. Professor Levitt was one of three recipients of the Samuel and Anna Pinanski Teaching Prize for 1998-1999, and in 1999, she was named Margaret Clapp '30 Distinguished Alumna Professor of Linguistics and French.
Barry Lydgate
135 Green Hall
781-283-2439
blydgate@wellesley.edu
Barry Lydgate teaches courses on post-Liberation Paris (Saint-Germain-des-Prés) and on Renaissance literature and culture (he has written on Rabelais, Montaigne, the genesis of the novel and literary self-portraiture in the sixteenth century). He is also interested in comparative and cross-century courses (his Grade II course Books of the Self examines confessional writings from St. Augustine to Annie Ernaux), and in language teaching. With a colleague at Yale, he is co-developer of French in Action, the multimedia course in French language and culture produced in conjunction with WGBH-TV Boston, with major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He is currently at work on interactive versions of French popular songs. Lydgate has thrice directed the college's junior year abroad program in Aix-en-Provence, most recently in the spring of 2004; he will again be its director in 2008-2009.
Catherine Masson
129D Green Hall
781-283-2417
cmasson@wellesley.edu
Catherine Masson, a specialist of theater, is especially interested in new and revolutionary forms of theater. Her approach to theater is not only literary and theoretical, but also practical (She has performed with professional actors, designed decor and costumes.). In her class, students are introduced to techniques of acting and directing. She is also concerned with the influence of performance on spectators and has studied surrealist, 20th century playwrights, and contemporary writers. She worked on the role of the stage director as critic, analyst and rewriter. She has created a montage on Jacques Prévert, Pour faire le portrait de Prévert, which has been performed in the US and in various European countries (1996, 2001). Since 2004, her play, George Sand - Gustave Flaubert, Echanges Epistolaires has been performed in France, Switzerland, Monaco, and in the US. She directed the play which was then published in 2006. She has directed a production of Huis clos by Jean-Paul Sartre that has been presented in Europe and the US. She is currently doing research on George Sand, Marguerite de Navarre and Olympe de Gouges as playwrights. Her book, L'Autobiographie et ses aspects théâtraux chez Michel Leiris, was published in 1995. She has done research on women playwrights at the Comédie-Française and has given presentations on Marguerite de Navarre’s, Olympe de Gouges’ and George Sand's theater. She has written articles on twentieth-century theater; since 1997 on George Sand's theater, on her adaptation of novels for the stage, and on her adaptation of Shakespeare. She has written an article on the reception of George Sand’s work in the US from 1837 to 1876. She co-edited eight plays by Marguerite de Navarre for the first volume of an anthology, Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien Régime (2006). She is currently preparing a book: George Sand: Novelist-Playwright.
Vicki Mistacco
229A Green Hall
781-283-2406
vmistacco@wellesley.edu
Vicki Mistacco is a specialist of the French novel and of women's writing in French across the centuries. Her research and teaching interests center on the novel of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special focus on women's writing and avant-garde fiction. She teaches a variety of 300-level courses: "Narrative in the Twentieth Century" which examines challenges to the "great narratives" of the past by twentieth-century writers ranging from André Gide to Assia Djebar; "Male and Female Perspectives in the Eighteenth-Century Novel" in which rediscovered important women's novels are read in dialogue with traditionally recognized masterpieces by their male contemporaries; "Women, Language, and Literary Expression" on the notion of difference in fiction by twentieth-century women writers in France; and a seminar on the poetics of the Other and the practice of écriture féminine in the works of Marguerite Duras. She has written articles and papers on reading and women in the novels of Duras and feminist rereadings of fiction by Albert Camus. She has also published articles and essays on François Mauriac, André Gide and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Her most recent research has evolved from "Women and Literary Tradition," a course which introduces students to the rich heritage of women's writing in France. Part one of Les Femmes et la tradition litteraire: Anthologie du Moyen Age a nos jours, a two-volume anthology of eight centuries of French women's writing she originally prepared for this course, was recently published by Yale University Press (2006). Part two will appear in late spring 2006. She was awarded an NEH Fellowship for College Teachers in support of this project. Her research on the relationship of the woman writer to literary tradition also informs articles on Chantal Chawaf ("Autofiction and the Woman Writer"), on "The Metamorphoses of Philomel" and on citation and innovation in George Sand's Lavinia, as well as papers on a nineteenth-century poet ("Writing as Wreckage: Louise Ackermann and the Female Poetic Voice") and on "Women Writers (Mis) Reading Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own ?".
James Petterson
131 Green Hall
781-283-2423
jpetters@wellesley.edu
James Petterson is a specialist of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and poetry with a focus on their philosophical and ideological contexts. In 2000 he published Postwar Figures of L'Ephémère: Yves Bonnefoy, Louis-René des Forêts, Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 248 pp). His next book, Poetry Proscribed: Twentieth-Century (Re)Visions of the Trials of Poetry in France, is forthcoming in 2008. Professor Petterson is currently working on a book project provisionally titled “Poetry’s In/Complete In/Difference” on poetry, philosophy, and political commitment in twentieth- and twenty-first-century France. Petterson is also the translator of works and essays by Gérard Noiriel, Jacques Dupin, Jean Baudrillard, and Yves Bonnefoy. Along with courses on poetry, Professor Petterson offers seminars on “Literature and Inhumanity: Novel, Poetry, and Film in Interwar France,” “Le Roman Contemporain et le Plaisir du Texte,” and “Commitment and the Contemporary French Poet.” He also offers an advanced course on the practice and theory of translation, a survey of French literature and culture from the Enlightenment to the present, and Intermediate French. Professor Petterson serves on a number of college committees including the Medical Professions Advisory Committee and he is the Regional (New England and Eastern Canada) Representative to the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly (2008-2010).
Anjali Prabhu
129A Green Hall
781-283-2495
aprabhu@wellesley.edu
Anjali Prabhu specializes in Francophone studies and theoretical issues in literature, culture, and postcolonial studies. Her first book, entitled, Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects, is forthcoming in the SUNY series in Postcolonial Thought (March 2007). The book includes account of the creole islands of Mauritius and La Réunion (Indian Ocean). It also includes discussion of postcolonial theory and thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant. Her published work includes articles and essays on theory and on the literature and culture of North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. Recently accepted peer-reviewed articles on Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant are to appear in Research in African Literatures and Diacritics, respectively. Anjali Prabhu is currently working on a book project on African cinema and will be on leave in Spring 2007. In the French Department, Professor Prabhu teaches different courses in Francophone and postcolonial studies that draw upon the work described above. Other courses she offers are French Literature and Culture from the Eighteenth-Century to the Present, Advanced Studies in Language, and Intermediate French.
Michèle Respaut
233 Green Hall
781-283-2721
mrespaut@wellesley.edu
Michèle Respaut teaches and publishes in a wide-ranging interdisciplinary perspective. At the 200 level, her "Love/Death" course spans several centuries of French fiction and investigates the connections between fiction and film and our fundamental preoccupation with the issues of love and loss. In French 215 , "Baudelaire/Verlaine/Rimbaud", she explores the body of three nineteenth-century French poets, who rank among the most influential in world literature. Professor Respaut taught "The Paris of Baudelaire" during Wintersession 2004, in Paris, France. Her French 300-level seminar on "Colette/Duras: A Pleasure unto Death", offers a selection of the best representative texts of these two prolific women writers. In keeping with her research in the field of Literature and Medicine, Professor Respaut was the Wellesley Summer Symposium Director :" The Healing Arts: Medicine from a Multidisciplinary Perspective." She offers two courses on that topic; FREN 327: "A Fascination with Bodies: the Doctor's Malady", and CPLT 334, "Literature and Medicine", a Comparative Literature course taught in English, which investigates literature's obsession with medicine. Literary and cinematic representations of doctors and patients, disability and pain, insanity, AIDS, birth, death and grief, the search for healing and the redemptive power of the arts inform the students' exploration. Several of her articles have been published in journals such as The French Review, Literature and Medicine, the contemporary French Studies journal, Sites, as well as in the MLA publication Teaching Literature and Medicine. Her last publication on Jacques Doillons's French film, "Ponette, the Perennial Mourning Child", is featured in a special issue devoted to Children and Illness in the journal, Literature and Medicine. Her current research is on "Mourning Children/Children in Mourning." Michèle Respaut was awarded the Pinanski Teaching Prize in 1990.
Among her many responsibilities at Wellesley, she is a pre-med advisor and as such a member of the Medical Professions Advisory Committee.
Marie-Paule Tranvouez
233A Green Hall
781-283-2975
mtranvouez@wellesley.edu
Marie-Paule Tranvouez is a specialist of the nineteenth-century French novel. In her doctoral dissertation she studied the various ways Balzac begins his narratives using a narratological and semiotic approach. Her teaching interests include French language, cultural studies, civilization and the autobiography as a genre. She is a co-author of the sixth edition of Ensemble: Culture et Société. She is presently the Secretary of the Association for French Cultural Studies and has coorganized three colloquia on cultural studies at Wellesley College.
