Hélène Bilis

Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Contact
Phone:
+1 (781) 283-2430
Email:
hbilis@wellesley.edu
Department
French, Francophone, and Italian Studies
Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing
Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Links

Specializes in French culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a particular focus on the relationship between literary texts and the socio-historical contexts in which they emerged.

My first book, Passing Judgment: The Politics and Poetics of Sovereignty in French Tragedy from Hardy to Racine (University of Toronto Press, 2016) examined how a character-type—the royal judge—remained a constant of the tragic genre, although the specifics of his role and position fluctuated as playwrights experimented with changing models of sovereignty onstage.

In keeping with my fondness for collaborative projects, I have co-edited (with Jennifer Tamas) a collection of articles, L’Eloquence du Silence: Dramaturgie du non-dit sur la scène théâtrale des 17e et 18e siècles. (Classiques Garnier, 2014), which investigates the paradoxical question of how silence makes itself heard on the theatrical stage. I also co-edited a volume with Ellen McClure on new approaches to teaching neoclassical tragedy in the twenty-first-century classroom (MLA, 2021). Stemming from my engagement with the promise and pitfalls of Digital Humanities methods, I developed a digital pedagogical edition and new translation of Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves with three colleagues from liberal arts colleges; it was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: https://www.wellesley.edu/news/2020/stories/node/173076

My new book project, tentatively titled, “The Anxiety of Competition: How Rivalry Spurred Innovation on the Seventeenth-Century Stage,” looks at the phenomenon of doublons—dueling plays, playwrights, and troupes in early modern Paris.

I enjoy teaching courses that range from introductory language to a multi-media seminar on Versailles and the Age of Louis XIV. As part of a course on women in power under the Ancien Régime, students, our library partners, and I designed a digital exhibit on an almanac that belonged to Marie-Antoinette. You can visit the exhibit here and read about it here.

I am the editor-in-chief of H-France Forum, and the Campus Director for the longstanding Wellesley-in-Aix study abroad program.

I served as an elected officer of the MLA French Seventeenth-Century Division Executive Committee (2012-2017) and have served on the Graduate Student Prizes Committee for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Prize Committee for SE17.

I like to travel, especially by train and to the Atlantic coast of France. I love swimming with my kids in Dug Pond in Natick on a warm summer day.

Professional Website

Education

  • B.A., Rutgers University-New Brunswick
  • M.A., University of California-Berkeley
  • Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley

Current and upcoming courses

Great Works of French and Francophone Theater, Then and Now

FREN333

An exploration of great works of French and Francophone theater from the seventeenth century to the present. Students will read the classical playwrights Molière, Corneille, and Racine, as well as lesser known but worthy early modern women dramatists, Catherine Bernard and Olympe de Gouges; the course will follow the aesthetic and thematic shifts brought on by Marivaux, Beaumarchais, and Hugo, and compare these to the theater of contemporary Francophone playwrights such as Yasmina Réza, Marie N’Diaye, and Wajdi Mouawad. Close attention will be paid to the historical settings and material conditions in which the plays first appeared, and how they have since been adapted and reprised in different political contexts and by troupes with varying objectives. Students will watch performances and grasp the unique position that theater occupies within the French cultural tradition.