Nicole Ferrari
Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in French
My research is a comparative inquiry into how nineteenth-century writers mediate the relationship between historical consciousness, political belonging, and ethics across national traditions. I bring French, Haitian, and Italian writers’ like Victor Hugo’s, Émeric Bergeaud’s, and Alessandro Manzoni’s political philosophies into dialogue with Francophone and Italian Enlightenment debates about republicanism, justice, and the conditions of freedom. My research has two prongs: the first examines how Renaissance and Enlightenment writers influenced nineteenth-century authors, with specific attention paid to Niccolò Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Cesare Beccaria. The second examines how nineteenth-century novels stage and dramatize radical, republican theory in order to provide the social imaginary in their countries for what society under democratic, republican rule would look and feel like.
To analyze these writers' literary activism, I draw from the ordinary language philosophy (OLP) of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and J. L. Austin who treat language as an ongoing practice through which human beings negotiate agreement, intelligibility, and shared criteria. Their account of language allows me to approach literature as a form of philosophical activity in its own right. Literature is the site where questions of knowledge, truth, and responsibility are not merely represented but enacted and tested. My project thus places eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts in conversation with contemporary philosophy to ask what literature can teach us about the conditions of democratic life. More broadly, I see OLP as a method for bringing philosophy and literature back into sustained conversation as practices capable of transforming how we understand language, judgment, and political belonging, both in the classroom and beyond it.
My recently published and submitted articles include an upcoming publication in the journal, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, for a special issue dedicated to Victor Hugo's poetics. The article is titled "The Way Back to the Human: a Cavellian Reading of Skepticism and Acknowledgment in Les Misérables." In 2025, my article, "Tumults or Tyranny: Victor Hugo's Appropriation of and Considerations on Machiavelli's Political Theory" was published in Il Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana. In 2024, the Australian Journal of French Studies published "'La vie finit par reprendre le dessus:' l'abject kristévien dans L'Ombre d'Imana de Véronique Tadjo," which analyzes Tadjo's text on the Rwandan genocide in the light of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in Pouvoir d'Horreur.
Education
- B.A., University of Delaware
- M.A., Middlebury Institute of International Studies
- M.A., University of Delaware
- M.A., Duke University
- Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Current and upcoming courses
Beginning French I
FREN101
Systematic training in all the language skills, with special emphasis on communication, self-expression, and cultural insights. Classes are supplemented by regular assignments in a variety of video, audio, print, and Web-based materials to give students practice using authentic French accurately and expressively. Three meetings weekly.
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Literature and Film in Cultural Contexts
FREN205
Discussion of modern literature and film in their cultural contexts. Training in techniques of literary and cultural analysis. Materials include novels, short stories, poetry, films, screenplays, and videos from France and the Francophone world. Vocabulary building and review of key points of grammar. Frequent written practice. Attention to oral skills and listening comprehension, as needed.