French Department's Administrative Assistant

Allahverdi


Sarah Allahverdi
228A Green Hall
781-283-2403
sallahve@wellesley.edu

 

 


French Department Faculty

 

Bilis


Hélène Bilis
231 Green Hall
781-283-2430
hbilis@wellesley.edu



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.

Datta


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.

Egron-Sparrow


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 the Director of the French House and is the Director of the Wellesley in Aix Program in 2009-2010.

Gillain


Anne Gillain
[Retired]


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.

 

Gunther


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: A History Of Homosexuality in Francem, 1942-present (Palgrave, 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.

Levitt


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.

Lydgate


Barry Lydgate
135 Green Hall
blydgate@wellesley.edu
Director, Wellesley-in-Aix, 2008-2009


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 directed the college's junior year abroad program in Aix-en-Provence four times, most recently in 2008-09.

Masson


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.

Mistacco


Vicki Mistacco
229A Green Hall
781-283-2406
vmistacco@wellesley.edu



Vicki Mistacco is a specialist of the French novel of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and of women’s writing in French across the centuries. 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 major women’s novels are read in dialogue with traditionally recognized masterpieces by their male contemporaries; “Women, Language, and Literary Expression,” on the crucial 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. Her 200-level course, Mothers and Daughters, traces the evolving representation and cultural significance of this complex relationship in literature and art from the late seventeenth century to the present. She has published articles on reading and women in novels by Duras, feminist rereadings of Camus, and essays on Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, George Sand, François Mauriac, André Gide and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Her two-volume anthology, Les femmes et la tradition littéraire: Anthologie du Moyen Age à nos jours (Yale University Press), Première partie: XIIe-XVIIIe siècles (2006); Seconde partie, XIXe-XXIe siècles (2007) evolved from materials created for “Women and Literary Tradition,” a course which introduces students to the rich heritage of women’s writing in France. She was awarded an NEH Fellowship in support of this project. Research on the relationship of women writers to literary tradition is central also to her current project on “The Impulse to Anthologize: Women Promoting French Women Writers (1750-1970)” and informs her writing on Chawaf, Sand, Genlis, Louise Ackermann, and Louise d’Alq.

Petterson


James Petterson
131 Green Hall
781-283-2423
jpetters@wellesley.edu

 

 

My intellectual interests are in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and poetry, with a focus on their philosophical and ideological contexts. My first book is titled Postwar Figures of L'Ephémère: Yves Bonnefoy, Louis-René des Forêts, Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet (Bucknell University Press, 2000), and my most recent book is titled Poetry Proscribed: Twentieth-Century (Re)Visions of the Trials of Poetry in France (Bucknell University Press, 2008). I am currently working on a book-project, provisionally titled “Poetry’s Incomplete Indifference," which focuses on poetry, philosophy and political commitment in 20th- and 21st-century France. I also translate into English works by French poets, philosophers and historians.

The courses I presently teach are listed here.
For my most recent CV contact me.

 

Prabhu


Anjali Prabhu
129A Green Hall
781-283-2495
aprabhu@wellesley.edu

 

I specialize in Francophone studies and theoretical issues in literature, cinema, culture, and postcolonial studies. I am currently preparing Cinema of Africa and the Disapora (To be published by Blackwell Press). My first book, entitled, Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects (2007) has appeared in the SUNY series, Explorations in Postcolonial Thought. My articles have undergone peer-review and appeared in journals such as Research in African Literatures, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, International Journal of Francophone Studies, and Diacritics. In upper-level classes I offer, you are likely to follow debates and read some articles taken from journals such as these. I’ve also contributed to edited collections in postcolonial/ Francophone studies. Some of this published work includes many authors whom you are likely to encounter in my classes as well: for example, Mariama Bâ from Senegal, Assia Djebar from Algeria, Driss Chraïbi from Morocco, Frantz Fanon from Martinique but also in some ways from Algeria, Edouard Glissant from Martinique, Marie-Thérèse Humbert from a small island called Mauritius, off the coast of Africa. I have been a Fellow at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities here at Wellesley in 2007. Other courses in Francophone studies, I offer are: FREN 218, 331, and 330. I also routinely teach FREN 210, 211, and 201-202. I look forward to meeting you in some of these courses for independent work. I am very interested in the following committees pertaining to student academics college-wide: Fulbright (I have served 3 consecutive years) and Extra-Mural Fellowships (currently serving second term).

 

Respaut


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.

Tranvouez


Marie-Paule Tranvouez
233A Green Hall
781-283-2975
mtranvouez@wellesley.edu



Marie-Paule Tranvouez, a specialist of the nineteenth French Novel, wrote her doctoral dissertation on Balzac using a narratological and semiotic approach. Her teaching interests include the French Novel, pedagogy, cultural studies and the autobiography as a genre. She is a co-author of the sixth edition of Ensemble: Culture et Société, a cultural textbook introducing students to contemporary French documents and media. With her colleague, Jean Marie Schultz, she recently published Réseau: Communication, Intégration, Intersections (Prentice Hall, 2009), an innovative intermediate French textbook based on the notion of linguistic and cultural intersections. She was the Secretary of the Association for French Cultural Studies for many years and has co-organized several colloquia on cultural studies at Wellesley College.  She is the Director of the French House in 2009-2010.