The Department of
FRENCH & ITALIAN T he Department of
French & Italian
N E W S L E T T E R
NEWSLETTER 20 19-2020 2 0Nor1 t9hwest - 2 0er2n0Univ er sit y Northwestern University
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR As we reflect on the joys, as well as the many challenges, of the past year, it is hard not to feel grateful for everything that we have achieved, and all that we have collectively become. In spite of the undeniable setbacks brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, we have accomplished great things. As importantly, we have discovered something we may not yet have fully known about who we are. While success comes relatively easily when times are good, it’s when times are not so good and seemingly insurmountable difficulties and uncertainties loom that we perceive more clearly what we are made of, and what we can do. This year, we witnessed the transformative power of our department’s culture of collaboration and leadership to turn a crisis into a growth opportunity. Through it all, we have strengthened our sense of community, thus meeting the challenge with a united front. Our resilience and courage in the face of radical change were on full display when the pandemic hit and we suddenly had to move all of our courses online. From day one, our DLPs Dominique Licops and Paola Morgavi, together with our language coordinators, contributed to our department’s preparedness plan with a 100% can-do, positive vision. Although we were not alone in this endeavor, by all accounts we were far ahead of the curve in terms of our performance in remote teaching. Most importantly, this trial by fire made visible for all of us the depth of collegiality that truly defines our department. You simply cannot mobilize as swiftly and thoughtfully as we did unless the foundation for collaboration and team work is already there. During the crisis, we also demonstrated our desire to problem solve at the level of the Graduate School, the University, and beyond. We advocated for faculty input on the university’s response to COVID, we contributed ideas on the College’s response to the budget crisis, we provided our graduate students with funding for books during the period of the library’s closure and,
thanks to our DGS, Nasrin Qader, we collaborated with other units to advocate for the needs of students adversely impacted by the pandemic. Internally, we remained intellectually engaged with the debates of the present by organizing an event on the impacts of COVID and the contributions of the French and Italian traditions to thinking about earlier plagues and strategies for coping with them—the only event of its kind in the College. In the wake of the civil unrest and national self-reflection triggered by the police killing of George Floyd, we also began discussions about what we could do as a department to combat the systemic racial inequality that has afflicted our country since its founding.
Through it all, we did not stop any of our other work in the areas of research and teaching. Scott Durham had already published an edited volume, Alessia Ricciardi and Domietta Torlasco each completed book projects, Chris Bush won a Kaplan Institute fellowship, and several other faculty published important articles. Two of our faculty were promoted—Paola Morgavi, to Full Professor of Instruction, and Daniela Pozzi-Pavan, to Assistant Professor of Instruction—and Matthieu Dupas was reappointed for a second term as an Assistant Professor. Dominique Licops was decorated with the one of the last remaining active noble ranks in France— as Knight in the Order of the Palmes Académiques—a civic honor in recognition of her outstanding teaching, language program leadership, and professional outreach. Thao Nguyen was named to the Associated Student Government (ASG) Honor Roll for his superlative teaching. Grads Maïté Marciano, Tamara Tasevska, Maureen Winter, and Rachel Grimm presented work at our departmental colloquia, numerous others passed exams, and Rachel
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defended her dissertation. To top it off, our two highly engaged and activist DUS’s—Cynthia Nazarian and Paola Morgavi—helped us graduate a class of 35 majors and minors, the largest in recent memory. Supporting these successes have been our staff—Liz Murray, Phil Hoskins, and our newest member who joined this year, Lisa Byrnes. Under Liz’s strong leadership, our staff assumed new responsibilities, gained new skills, and helped the faculty transition to remote teaching. In addition, we welcomed back two of our emeritus faculty—Sylvie Romanowski and Tom Simpson—who generously taught for us in Winter. Throughout the year, ENS exchange student Manon Fabre taught third year French language classes for us, and Lindsay Eufusia, Lecturer in Italian, captivated our elementary and intermediate Italian students for the second year in a row. Although Lindsay is moving on from Northwestern, we will always be deeply grateful for her energetic and dedicated service. At the dawn of a new academic year, therefore, I would like to thank every member of our community for weathering this storm with the utmost dedication and esprit de corps. In these pages, you will find evidence of our success in focusing on what matters as a community. You will also discover portraits of individual achievement, from Scott Durham’s pathbreaking work on politics and aesthetics in Jacques Rancière, to the story of our graduate alumna Nathalie Étoké’s rapid rise from graduate student to Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. It is my hope that as you read of our exploits in the academic year 2019-20, you will find the inspiration to carry on with renewed passion as we move through and, hopefully, past, this pandemic.
Doris L. Garraway Department Chair
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October 2019, Department Fall Party
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FEATURED FACULTY: Scott Durham
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GRADUATE NEWS
April 2020, Paris, COVID-19 lockdown. photo by Maureen Winter
PGs 19-22 FEATURED ALUMNA: Nathalie Etoké
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2017, Chantal Akerman Symposium
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS
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left: Etoké; right:“Melancholia Africana”
January 2020, Merriem Bahri and Matthieu Dupas
February 2020, field trip to Chicago Symphony Center
IN THIS ISSUE 02
French over lunch. Margaret was set to present a paper at the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF) convention in Trois Rivières, Canada, this past July. Since they had to postpone it due to COVID-19, she looks forward to presenting at the convention in 2021. Despite the fact that the Chicago Marathon has been officially cancelled, Margaret continues to train and will run an unofficial 26.2 mile race in October.
FACULTY NEWS Like many people, much of what CHRISTOPHER BUSH had planned for the year was cancelled or postponed because of the pandemic, but he did co-lead and present in a seminar on “Late Surrealism” at the annual Modernist Studies Association conference, in Toronto, in the fall. And just a few days before the lockdowns began Bush gave a talk at NYU for the Poetics and Theory seminar and the Department of Comparative Literature. His main scholarly activity for 2019-20 was continuing to serve as Co-Editor of the journal Modernism/ modernity; this year he became editor of the Print Plus platform as well: https://modernismmodernity.org/ starting in Fall 2020 and will work closely with the Teaching Assistants of French. She will also teach French 101 for the School of Professional Studies. Margaret continues as the Study Abroad Adviser for French as well as a member of the University Study Abroad Committee (USAC). An active member of the Council on Language Instruction (CLI), she serves as CoChair of its Study Abroad Committee. As Associate Chair of the International Studies Residential College (ISRC), she enjoys interacting with residents – even via remote Zoom meetings. She MARGARET DEMPSTER will assume also co-coordinates the Table française the role as Coordinator of French 111 where participants meet and speak CHRISTOPHER DAVIS has been working toward the completion of his first monograph, The Empire of Song: Language, Form and the Transmission of Troubadour Lyric. In the Spring, he gave a talk based on the second chapter of the book at the annual conference of the Medieval Academy of America and also drew on material from Chapter three for an article, “L’Amour et l’amitié dans les razos de Bertran de Born,” which was published in the revue Cahiers d’études hispaniques médiévales (42).
NEW FACULTY
MASSIMILIANO L. DELFINO
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MATTHIEU DUPAS has been busy writing the first chapter of his book manuscript on gallantry in 17th-century France this year. He participated in a workshop where he gave a paper on the “semantic of gallantry” at the SE17 38th annual conference at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte in October 2019. He organized costume designer Meriem Bahri’s lecture on “17th and 18th century stage costumes at the French court” in the FRIT department on January 26, 2020. He published a new article in a peer-reviewed journal, “Gallantry and Matrimonial Heterosexuality: Love and Friendship in Scudéry’s ‘Carte de Tendre’ (1654),” in Exemplaria, 32. 2 (2020). This summer, DORIS GARRAWAY submitted an invited article manuscript entitled “Raising the Living Dead in Postrevolutionary Haiti: Glory, Salvation, and Theopolitical Sovereignty in the Kingdom of Henry Christophe” for publication in a special edition of the
MASSIMILIANO L. DELFINO (Italian, Ph.D. Columbia University), Assistant Professor of Instruction in Italian, earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature from “La Sapienza” University of Rome, his M.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill and his Ph.D. in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. His research focuses on post-World War II Italian political cinema and literature. Recent publications include “A Cinematic Anti-Monument against Mafia Violence: P. Diliberto’s La mafia uccide solo d’estate” published in Annali d’italianistica and “Children, Catharsis, and the Aesthetics of Random Violence in Italian Crime Films of the 1970s” (forthcoming). His research uses film theory, literary theory and critical theory to shed light on the nexus between the aesthetic and the political. He is currently working on a book manuscript that analyzes representations of terrorism in Italian films and novels of the 1970s and their relationship to the concept of “civility.”
journal Atlantic Studies. This article is based on a keynote address on a related topic that she gave at the conference “Liberty and Death: Pirates and Zombies in Atlantic Modernity” at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, Austria, in 2018. This past winter, Garraway gave an invited talk entitled “Silencing the Slave Revolution in Postrevolutionary Haiti: Tragedy, Color, and Family Romance in Haiti’s Earliest Historiography” at the symposium “Undercurrents: Connection and Rupture in the Caribbean, from the Pre-Columbian Era to 1900.” In the fall of 2019, she was interviewed for a special edition of a philosophy podcast series curated by Peter Adamson and Chike Jeffers devoted to Africana philosophy, specifically the philosophy of revolutionary Haiti. The highlight of DOMINIQUE LICOPS’ year was the honor of being named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Knight in the Order of the Academic Palms), in a ceremony led by the French Consul of Chicago, Guillaume Lacroix, in fall 2019. This title is bestowed by the French Republic to distinguished academics and figures in the world of culture and education. Dominique also participated in two series of the round tables “A Seat at the Table: Centering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Learning and Teaching Contexts,” the first in the fall, and the second, focusing on remote learning, Massimiliano has taught various levels of Italian at UNC-Chapel Hill, Columbia University and Ca’ Foscari in Venice. For his excellence in teaching, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award (SUTA) at UNC-Chapel Hill, and was a finalist for the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. His classes have a strong cultural component, and his interests in language pedagogy include intermediality in language classes, intercultural competence, and diversity and inclusion. He is a trained Microteaching Facilitator and in this capacity worked for Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
FACULTY NEWS
Prof. CYNTHIA NAZARIAN’s recent OpEd connects the COVID-19 pandemic to the Renaissance, to take stock of where the impacts are heaviest, and what stories, along with lives, are being lost: “Today, the idea of celebrating the sacrifice of working-class lives to save the privileged few would rightly seem abhorrent. Looking back across five centuries shows us how far society has come in many ways, but it also shows us the problems that are still with us.” https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/weve-always-needed-covid-19-stories-arent-told
in the Spring. As the University and Department responded to the pandemic, Dominique worked with the Chair, Doris Garraway, and fellow DLP in Italian, Paola Morgavi to prepare for transitioning FRIT language courses online. She participated in a number of Zoom, Canvas, and Remote Learning trainings, and then offered some Zoom practice sessions for faculty and graduate students to prepare them to teach online. She attended many of the
Spring COPE sessions organized by WCAS to help faculty teach in this new environment, and presented “Keeping Students Engaged with the Use of Google Docs and Break-out rooms in Synchronous Classes in Zoom” at one of those sessions. She also participated in the practicum on the Foundations of Online Teaching offered in the Spring to help instructors transition their summer and fall courses online.
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& Italian presents The Department of French
Prep arin g the Grou nd ive Com pete nce for Inte rcul tura l Com mun icat Class room Stere otyp es in the Lang uage
a presentation by
MASSIMILIANO DELFINO Columbia University is a PhD Massimiliano L. Delfino Studies Candidate in Italian e at and Comparative Literatur s Columbia University. He specialize cinema political in post-war Italian language in and and literature y. pedagog Italian His dissertation analyzes violence representations of political in film during the “anni di piombo” Italian and literature. His work on in political cinema has appeared and is Annali d’Italianistica (2017) volume edited forthcoming in an Italy. in on the 1970s
. Crowe Hall 2-130 4:00pm Monday, February 10, 2020
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FACULTY NEWS, continued... On April 27, 2019, PAOLA NASTI organized an international conference held at the University of Notre Dame entitled “Quodlibetal Culture in Dante’s Time: Florence, Italy, and Europe.” She gave a paper on the Florentine preacher Remigio de’ Girolami to question Dante’s relationship with the academic culture of his times. She completed her piece for the first Italian companion on Dante: ‘Dante e la tradizione scritturale’ (in ‘Dante’, ed. by D. Rea, J. Steinberg, Rome 2019). She also submitted an extensive piece on Dante’s Monarchia, scheduled to appear in 2021 in Dante’s Other Works, ed. by Z. Baranski and T. Cachey, Notre Dame UP. She has written a long essay on Dante and translation, ‘To speak in tongues’, which will appear in 2020 in Toscana bilingue (1260-1430): per una storia sociale del tradurre medievale, ed. by S. Bischetti, M. Lodone, C. Lorenzi, A. Montefusco, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2020. In the summer 2020 she has been busy completing her essay on ‘Dante and the Bible’ for a volume on the Medieval Bible for the Bloomsbury prestigious series on the Bible and Literature and a chapter for a volume on Dante’s Vita nova edited by Cambridge University and Notre Dame. She has also enjoyed teaching in-person and on Zoom some of the most talented students she has ever met!
DANIELA POZZI PAVAN was promoted to Assistant Professor of Instruction in Italian, effective in Fall 2020. She joined the Undergraduate Language Grant Committee and the Meetings and Orientation Committee where she has been nominated CoChair, effective in Fall 2020. In autumn, Daniela participated in the 2019 ACTFL Convention where she presented her project titled “Beauty and Creativity in an Italian Language and Culture Course.” The project aimed at inspiring learners to discover the beauty of the Italian culture and to reach an Intermediate High Standard of Language Proficiency (ACTFL guidelines), by analyzing evocative works of well-known artists, architects and writers through engaging culturally authentic sources and innovative pedagogical activities. To deepen students’ appreciation and understanding of Italian culture, she organized two successful off-campus events for all students enrolled in Italian language and culture courses. NASRIN QADER returned from research leave in January 2020 and became the department’s Director of Graduate Studies. Her most recent publication is on two Persian short stories by the Afghan writer, Asef Soltanzadah. Entitled “Life at Play: Impossible Worlds of Asef Soltanzadah’s ’The Two of Clubs’ and ‘If Not Falls’,” it is forthcoming in the Journal of World Literature. CHRISTIANE REY organized and chaired a round table entitled: Ins and Outs of Immigration in the Academy: Employment and Visas for Faculty at the MLA Conference in Seattle in January 2020.
Congratulations to THAO NGUYEN, who was named to the Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll for 2019-2020 for his superlative teaching of elementary French language. Way to go, Thao!
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Minnesota), in which she posits rhythm as a pivotal mode of resistance to power. In the Fall quarter, she attended the First International Conference on Humanities Transformation, held at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), where she presented her work-inprogress on the mythology of the Anthropocene and its cinema. In October 2019 ALESSANDRA VISCONTI took part in the 2019 edition of the Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo at the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago. The theme this year was l’Italiano sul palcoscenico (Italian on the stage) and she was invited to moderate a conversation with the distinguished Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli on the art of diction and gesture in operatic recitativo. Visconti coached music of 1617th century composers for two performances with the Early Music Ensemble of the University of Chicago. In February of 2020 Visconti participated in Riccardo Muti’s critically acclaimed concert performances of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. She organized a field trip for students of Italian to attend the opening night performance at Orchestra Hall.
Edward Poynter, Orpheus and Eurydice
For the first online opera production of the Bienen School of Music, Visconti coached Italian language and diction remotely for Monteverdi’s Orfeo by recording audiofiles for the ensemble. DOMIETTA TORLASCO held a This innovative production will be residency at the Centre for Humanities available for video streaming in the Fall Research at the University of the of 2020. Western Cape (South Africa) during Over the summer Visconti began the Winter quarter. There she screened collecting digital materials that a rough-cut of her new video essay, highlight the voices of Black Italian Garfield Park, USA, on violence and writers, journalists, and activists. She has play on the Chicago West Side, and assembled a corpus of video interviews discussed portions of her forthcoming and language activities which she will book, The Rhythm of Images: Cinema continue to develop during fall and Beyond Measure (University of winter quarters.
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT PAOLA MORGAVI
A veteran professor of Italian language and culture, PAOLA MORGAVI was promoted to the rank of Professor of Instruction in spring 2020, a rank she shares with just one other member of our language teaching faculty, CHRISTIANE REY. An award-winning teacher, Paola has excelled in teaching at all levels of the Italian language curriculum while also serving as Director of the Italian Language Program and, most recently, as interim Director of Undergraduate Studies in Italian. Paola’s ascent to the pinnacle of the teaching track reflects her consummate and unflagging dedication to her students, colleagues, and the greater profession. An expert in the fields of Italian language curriculum development and assessment, she has given numerous conference presentations, professional development trainings, and workshops on these and other areas of Italian language pedagogy, locally and nationally. Paola is also an accomplished translator, having translated a number of poems by writer Camillo Sbarbaro, as well as philosophical essays by Peter Fenves, Northwestern Professor of German and Comparative Literature. In addition, Paola has gained national and international recognition as a leader in Italian language pedagogy thanks to the high-level offices she holds with American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the College Board. Notably, she has served as Chief Reader of the AP Italian Language exam since 2017, a position that is commonly held by tenure line faculty. As such, Paola occupies the highest leadership position in the Italian AP program, and is charged with directly leading a committee of Italian educators in the creation and scoring of all AP Italian exams given annually. A hearty congratulations to Paola on her well-deserved promotion, and on all of her professional achievements! As if this weren't enough, in autumn, Paola participated in the annual ACTFL Convention in Washington D.C. with a presentation entitled “Grammar at the Intermediate Level: How and Why.” Doris L. Garraway
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FACULTY SPOTLIGHT SYLVIE ROMANOWSKI When Doris Garraway called me out of retirement at the end of October 2019 to ask me if I would teach a 300-level French literature course in the winter, I said yes immediately. I taught a course to 9 students, mostly seniors, on the notion of sovereignty and its critics in the 18th century. It was such a rewarding experience to teach an advanced literature class to engaged students, and to read with them major texts of the French Enlightenment. I realized how much I miss teaching, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do it again. And, retrospectively, I am also glad that I did this in “normal times.�
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FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
As a result of unforeseeable departmental circumstance THOMAS SIMPSON and global cataclysm, it was my good fortune to be asked back to NU last winter to teach a scheduled undergraduate Reading in the regime of covid-19, what leapt out for our course on Boccaccio’s Decameron. group was that in the whole vast Decameron there do not seem to be any minor characters. Everyone believes The book begins with a description of the plague in themselves the main figure in their respective tale. The Florence in 1348 and its devastating effects on a vibrant, exception proving the rule, the few characters who try to proto-capitalist city spiraling in cycles of boom-and- stand away from the limelight are for that reason thrust bust. Boccaccio’s Introduction details how the contagion center stage, whether in shame or glory. Either overtly or rapidly broke down even the most sacrosanct cultural covertly, across a hundred tales and the discussion around traditions, such as funerary practices, and short-circuited them, almost no idea is proposed without being shortly seemingly hardwired codes of behavior between master undermined. Jew, Christian, and Muslim stand face to and servant, man and woman, parent and child; even face. Nothing is taken for granted and everything is in play. between people and animals. In the book, ten well Even the objects in the book—the floating chest that saves brought up young people employ narration in an effort to Landolfo Rufolo from drowning and makes him rich; the draw some tentative relief from catastrophe. Individually crane’s leg Chicchibio feeds to his girlfriend instead of his they are powerless, but by sitting in a circle, telling and boss; the ring that proves Torello’s identity after he’s been discussing stories, they somehow save the world (or if not transformed into an Arab—even the objects seem convinced the world, at least each other, at least for now). that the story is all about them. Parallels with our situation in 2020 were unmistakable. The course thus offered a perfect opportunity to test the hypothesis so dear to Humanities departments that literature, its study, and art in general serve not merely as a refuge from reality, but also provide, despite evidence to the contrary, some beneficial function—social cohesion, say, or useful ethical/moral lessons to apply in times of crisis. Could our bright little class, debating the Decameron, somehow see us safely through to the other side of this world-changing event?
So ultimately, were we saved by the Decameron, and did we save one another? Ultimately, who can know? But temporarily (please note, donors and boards of trustees:) yes, decidedly. When the zone of maximum danger is that of human contact, the flow of idea and imagination is the stuff of life and the means of survival. Taking up this book, we join and renew an immortal circle.
MAJOR FIGURES IN ITALIAN HISTORY & CULTURE
Surviving to Tell: Crooks, Death, and Sex in Medieval Narrative PROFESSOR SIMPSON PROFESSOR SIMPSON
ITALIAN 370 ITALIAN 370
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FEATURED FACULTY Scott Durham
Scott Durham
Among the many accomplishments of our colleague, SCOTT DURHAM, his recently published edited volume, entitled Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière between Aesthetics and Politics (Northwestern UP, 2019), certainly stands out. Co-edited with Dilip Gaonkar, with an afterword by Jacques Rancière himself, the book contributes to several debates across the humanities that have been sparked by the enthusiastic and wide-ranging critical reception of Rancière’s work. As described by the publisher, the volume “confronts a question at the heart of [Rancière’s] thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the ‘politics of aesthetics’ and the ‘aesthetics of politics’? Specifically, the book explores the implications of Rancière’s rethinking of the relationship of aesthetic to political democracy from a range of critical perspectives. Distributions of the Sensible contains original essays by leading scholars on topics such as Rancière’s relation to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film. It concludes with a new essay by Rancière that reconsiders the practice of theory
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between aesthetics and politics.” (From the book jacket.) This book advances Scott’s broad and varied research agenda in 20th- and 21st-century literature, film, and theory, with particular emphasis on Foucault, Deleuze, and Rancière, as well as the Marxist critical tradition. Earlier publications by Scott include the book Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford University Press), a special issue of Yale French Studies issue on Jean Genet, and numerous essays on French and Francophone film, literature, and theory. Energized by his work on the volume on Rancière, Scott is currently completing a book manuscript, entitled “Between Rancière and Deleuze: Aesthetics, Politics, Resistance.” He generously agreed to be featured in this newsletter in order to share with us some insights into the fascinating questions that preoccupied him in the edited volume, and that led him to develop this inquiry further in his current book. Doris L. Garraway
Why did you decide to undertake this edited volume on Rancière’s work? This collection of essays grew out of an international conference (and subsequent Summer Institute and MLA panel) on Jacques Rancière’s work on aesthetics and politics which took place with Rancière’s participation at Northwestern University. The resulting dialogue— which brought together prominent scholars representing a broad range of disciplines and national traditions in such fields as political theory, film studies, literature, critical theory and rhetoric—focused on how Rancière’s thought provides a new angle through which to approach the relationship of politics to aesthetics.
FEATURED FACULTY Scott Durham
above, image credit: alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/ep-11-ranciere-the-distribution-of-the-sensible below: Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière between Aesthetics and Politics. Northwestern University Press, 2019 nupress.northwestern.edu/content/distributions-sensible
In a nutshell, can you help nonspecialists understand how aesthestics are not only political, but also constitute a form of democratic practice, for Rancière? What links aesthetics to politics in Rancière is the notion that what we have in common—whether that be a body politic, a space we might inhabit, a field of sensuous experience or a work of art—is at the same time divided among us unequally according to a principle of hierarchy. That’s what Ranciere calls the distribution of the sensible: the way we assume as self-evident in our social or political practices and speech, as well as in our ways of imagining and representing our experience, a hierarchical distribution of places, roles and capacities where it is a given whose speech counts as significant and whose as insignificant, who is recognized as a social actor and who is consigned to a merely passive and meaningless existence, as well as what sensations, emotions and experiences are worthy of remark as against what is to be passed over in silence. For Rancière, art and politics both contest (albeit in different ways) the reigning distribution of the sensible by polemically enacting, within and against its hierarchical organization of the world, the possible emergence of a community of equals.
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FACULTY SPOTLIGHT 10
FEATURED FACULTY Scott Durham
To cite just one example, drawn from Rancière’s writings on politics: when the 19th-century French revolutionary Blanqui claims to address the court at his trial in the name of “proletarians,” he is speaking on behalf of a collective that is not legally or politically recognized —workers of various kinds had assigned places in society according to the division of labor, of course, but not the proletariat as a collective actor considered capable of intervening in debates about the governance of France. In claiming to speak on behalf of the proletariat, Blanqui is thus in a sense performing a literary act. For Blanqui is projecting onto an existing world (where workers are not entitled to have a part as such in politics at all) another configuration of the world, where the speech of the workers would be given equal weight alongside that of their supposed betters (for whom their speech doesn’t count as political since the powers that be refuse to recognize workers as potential interlocutors). The proletariat in whose
name Blanqui speaks is still in this sense a fiction —an as yet nonexistent collective body, which appears in the trial only as the referent of what Rancière calls “empty words.” But those “empty words” nonetheless have real effects in challenging the hierarchical order in whose “distribution of the sensible” the proletariat as a political protagonist should not be able to appear. Literary though it may be, Blanqui’s intervention thus nonetheless reconfigures the map of who can be seen and heard as a political actor. For Rancière, art and politics both intervene in their own ways within and against the hierarchies he sees as organizing both our political practices and the forms of our experience by affirming a principle of equality that has no place in the hierarchical organization of social or aesthetic space, and whose appearance within that space necessarily transforms it. While the practices of political and aesthetic democracy are necessarily distinct, they are nonetheless implicated in and intertwined with one another.
Jacques Rancière
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FEATURED FACULTY Scott Durham
What was the most rewarding thing for you about doing the book from an intellectual standpoint? In other words, did the book enable you to make any new discoveries about Rancière or open up new directions in your own research? In addition to the long theoretical introduction I wrote for the volume, Dilip and I initially planned for me to write an essay focusing on how Rancière’s conception of the politics of aesthetics relates to that of Deleuze (from whose work Rancière draws extensively in formulating his own aesthetic concepts, but of whose approach he is sometimes harshly critical). The essay, which developed the philosophical, historical and political implications of Deleuze and Rancière’s aesthetics through readings of the films of Jean Renoir from the Popular Front period soon grew into a book project with an expanded corpus (including films of Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Abderrahmane Sissako, as well as a discussion of the very different relations of Deleuze and Rancière’s aesthetics to the thought of Michel Foucault). I’m now very close to completing work on that manuscript. The working title is Between Rancière and Deleuze: Aesthetics, Politics, Resistance.
above: Dilip Gaonkar below, left: Scott Durham, Genet: In the Language of the Enemy. Yale French Studies, vol. 91. 1997 below, right: Scott Durham, Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism. Stanford University Press, 1998
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GRADUATE NEWS
Message from the DGS 2019-2020 has been both an exciting and profoundly challenging year for our graduate students. The unprecedented conditions of the COVID 19 era have demanded extreme flexibility, determination and commitment from all of them, as they continued to advance their own work, teach their classes in new ways, and contended with the restrictions of the lock-down. Several of our students were abroad on research, far away from home and family. Our international students confronted changing and uncertain policies regarding travel and visa status that compounded the difficulties of day to day life. Yet, they all rose to the occasion with courage, resilience and camaraderie. I want to extend a hearty thanks to all of them for continuing to be such responsive and engaged members of the department throughout this difficult process of adjustment and to congratulate them collectively for their accomplishments, large and small.
As current restrictions unfortunately do not allow Moussa to travel to Paris, he will attend the program virtually. In May, Rachel Grimm defended her provocative dissertation, “The Afterlives of Amnesia: Remembering the Algerian War of Independence in Contemporary France and Algeria, 1999–2019,” Etienne Lussier, who was in lockdown in Paris in the spring, nevertheless defended his prospectus and is making excellent progress on his dissertation, and Raja Ben Hammed Dorval passed her PhD exams in March and is hard at work on her prospectus. More recently, Ibou Tall garnered a Northwestern Buffett Institute Global Impacts Graduate Fellowship for the academic year 2020-2021. The department’s essay prize was awarded to Xinyi Wei for her essay “In Search of Miniature : Proustian Japonisme and Scale.” Congratulations to everyone. Students contributed willingly and generously to the intellectual life of the department. Maïté Marciano and Tamara Tasevska shared their promising research in the winter edition of our departmental graduate colloquium and Rachel Grimm and Maureen Winter held an engaging colloquium via Zoom in the spring.
Moussa Seck successfully defended his prospectus and was awarded a prestigious and highly competitive fellowship to participate in the Paris Program in Critical Theory during the academic year 2020-2021, working with As of September 2020, five new Professor SAMUEL WEBER and other graduate students will join our cohort. prominent figures in Critical Theory. Louise Barbosa, Guillaume de Broux,
Anne-Marie Kommers, Nyi Nyi Ohn Myint, and Amanda Parraguez will bring exciting new directions for research and will enhance with their presence the rich tapestry of our community. We are very much looking forward to welcoming them to the department. We are delighted to learn that two of our recent PhD recipients secured tenure track positions starting in fall 2020. Joseph Derosier will begin his post as Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Beloit College and Brittany Murray will join the University of Tennessee’s department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures. We wish them every success as they open this new chapter of their intellectual life. As always, the intellectual mission of the department was richly sustained by the contributions and support of the faculty and the hard work of our staff. Thanks to Phil Hoskins and Elizabeth Murray for their continued cheerful dedication to the department’s administration in general and to the graduate program and our students in particular. This year, while we said goodbye to Kiley Mogan-Myrick, we welcomed Lisa Brynes as our new Department Graduate Assistant who quickly became an integral part of our department. Last but certainly not least, I extend my hearty gratitude to our amazing department chair, DORIS GARRAWAY, who, with her tireless attention and endless generosity has made adapting to the uncertainties of these times so smooth for all of us. We are very fortunate to have such an excellent leader at the helm. The academic year 2020-2021 will doubtless come with its own unprecedented demands. I am fully confident that we will meet them with the same resilience and collaborative spirit and look forward to working with everyone.
Slide from Rachel Grimm’s dissertation, “The Afterlives of Amnesia: Remembering the Algerian War of Independence in Contemporary France and Algeria, 1999–2019.”
13 GRADUATE NEWS
Nasrin Qader Director of Graduate Studies
GRADUATE NEWS Graduate Students
Civic Engagement’s intergenerational storytelling initiative. She will act as the department’s event coordinator for the year 2020-2021.
Maureen Winter and Jessica Passos in Paris, spending their departmental book fund money wisely.
RAJA BEN HAMMED DORVAL gave a presentation entitled “Immigration and Nationalism: The Algerian Example of the North African Star at AfriSem.” She passed her qualifying exams in the Spring and is currently at work on her prospectus. Raja will serve as the TA Coordinator for the 2020-2021 academic year. ELOISA BRESSAN passed her qualifying exams in the Fall and is now finalizing her prospectus, tentatively titled “Spectres of Gramsci: Gramsci’s Literary Praxis and its Global Resurgences.” On the day before lockdown was announced in the state of Illinois, she presented a portion of her work titled “Popular/populist: a Gramscian reading of Benito Mussolini’s
novel” at the Comparative Literary Studies department. This summer, she would have been in Paris for the third edition of the Summer Institute of Psychoanalysis on Psychoanalysis and Politics—a partnership between Northwestern University and Paris Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She would also have traveled to Italy, where she would have attended the Canadian Association for Italian Studies Conference in Sorrento, presenting the paper “Romanzo popolare e populismo: Mussolini romanziere” on the political and cultural relevance of Mussolini’s short-lived career as a novelist. However, her summer research projects were canceled because of the pandemic. Eloisa is currently a volunteer for the Center for
RACHEL MIHUTA GRIMM recently completed and successfully defended her dissertation, entitled “The Afterlives of Amnesia: Remembering the Algerian War of Independence in Contemporary France and Algeria, 1999–2019.” Examining the mutually constitutive relationship between cultural narratives, collective memory, and historiography, Rachel’s dissertation analyzes modern cultural and media representations of the Algerian War of Independence (1954– 1962) to demonstrate the sustained traumatic impact of the anti-colonial conflict in contemporary France and Algeria. Rachel has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor position in the department for the 2020–21 academic year. She is looking forward to teaching her very first content course, which will focus on the French art of “flânerie” in modern and contemporary French culture. She will also offer a correspondence course on Albert Camus to incarcerated students at the Cook County Jail as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program. ÉTIENNE LUSSIER spent the last academic year in Paris through the Paris Program in Critical Theory and attended Samuel Weber’s seminar around the works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. He became a PhD candidate and defended his thesis prospectus entitled “Prehistoric Art in French Contemporary Literature. From Prehistory to Posthistory”, which evolves around the question of prehistoric images in the literary works of Georges Bataille, Pierre Michon, Pascal Quignard and Éric Chevillard. He is currently in the process of establishing a dual PhD degree with University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, under the direction of Scott Durham and Bruno Blanckeman.
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GRADUATE NEWS
Graduate Students, continued... FANNY ALICE MARCHAISSE has been nominated as student-faculty liaison for the department and will serve as such for the year 2020-2021. Her overarching topic of interest in her research is feminine education, violence, and gender. During the academic year of 2019-2020 Fanny wrote and is attempting to get published a paper on the onomastic multiplicity in Linda Lê’s novel, Les trois Parques. Recently, she has been working on the concept of individuation in the late 17th to early 18th century. MAÏTÉ MARCIANO organized a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting entitled “Forms of (dis)Affection,” however, the meeting was canceled due to the pandemic. She presented a paper entitled “The Zero Degree of Affect” during the Graduate Student Colloquium in the French department at Northwestern University. She also led different workshops for the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching. She led workshops in the Fall at the New Teaching Assistant Conference on close-reading and teaching for Non- Native Instructors and in the Winter on facilitating inclusive discussions and intercultural pedagogy strategies.
dissertation while doing research at INA (Institut National de L’Audiovisuel) and the Jacques Doucet library. She officialized her cotutelle de thèse with Professor Isabelle Alfandary and MariePaule Berranger from Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle and finished her first chapter tentatively titled “From Said Dictation to a Siren’s Song: Poetic Voice in Robert Desnos’s Corps et Biens.” In the fall, she attended Samuel Weber’s seminar “Derrida, Levinas: The Question of the Other” and presented her paper “Robert Desnos and the echoes of late surrealism” at the Modernist Studies Association’s annual conference. She concluded the translation of Leonie Hunter’s article titled “Le « meilleur » ordre politique : Rancière, Honneth et Adorno sur la possibilité d’un ordre politique autoréflexif” soon to be published in Croisements critiques : l’actualité de l’École de Francfort by the
NORAN MOHAMED was a fellow in the Paris Program in Critical Theory this year. During her time in Paris, she attended Samuel Weber’s seminar and worked on writing her dissertation in various Parisian libraries and cafés. She also attended classes at the ENS in the Fall semester and attended a variety of conferences and events in the city. In November, Noran presented at the annual conference of the Society for Francophone and Postcolonial Studies in London. At the end of the quarter, she worked as a Research Adviser to students participating in the NU exchange program in Art, Literature, and Contemporary European Thought (ALCET). JESSICA PASSOS spent the year in Paris where she continued writing her
15 GRADUATE NEWS
Noran Mohamed at the Musée d'Orsay
French publishing house La découverte. More recently, she contributed to Maureen Winter’s literary and critical theory zine Bruit. After attending its meetings, Jessica was invited to join the new committee of the graduate student workshop Causeries Critiques at Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle starting in the fall. MOUSSA SECK is currently working on the first chapter of his dissertation project after successfully defending his prospectus last winter. His dissertation explores the singularity of the stranger in the francophone migration novel. Moussa is one of the recipients of the Paris Program in Critical Theory at Northwestern for the year 2020. Last year, Moussa worked, as a translator, on the groundbreaking project Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Arts, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval
Saharan Africa, to be coordinated by the Block Museum at Northwestern. His collaborations around campus have enabled him to be nominated a 2019 Undergraduate Mentor at the International Studies Program and the Graduate Assistant at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA). His recent publications include an opinion piece on the question of restitution of African cultural heritage entitled “Rendre à ces arts ce qui appartient à ces arts”. IBOU TALL served as the department’s TA Coordinator for the 2019-2020 school year. Beside becoming a father for the first time - to a beautiful daughter -, he received the Buffett Institute’s Global Impacts Graduate Fellowship which provides financial support as well as professional development and growth opportunities to an interdisciplinary cohort of about 20 graduate students for the 2020-2021 academic year. Ibou is currently writing his dissertation, entitled “Translation as Relationality: Movement and Circulation in Postcolonial African Literature” In January, upon her return from Paris, TAMARA TASEVSKA presented a paper on Claire Denis’ cinema at the MLA Annual Convention (2020) in Seattle. She also presented at the Department Graduate Colloquium
in March and assisted with the administration of student recruitment. Her article, “Godard’s Contra-Bande: Early Comic Heroes in Pierrot le fou and Le Livre d’image,” was published in Études Francophones (special issue) in May, 2020, and her second article “The Colour of the Possible: Olafur Eliasson, and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Colour-Image’ in Claire Denis’ High Life” was published this summer in Frames Cinema Journal. She received a research grant from the French Interdisciplinary Group (FIG) and continues to conduct research on the politics of color in French film and culture. After a turbulent year and an unpredictable summer, Tamara is staying in Chicago and focusing on finishing her dissertation under the direction of her advisor Scott Durham. XINYI WEI is a second year PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies with a home department in French and Italian. This year she has completed her coursework requirements. She researched and wrote on various topics including the notion of scale in Proust’s Japonism, Deleuze and Guattari and Daoist philosophy, and an affective interpretation of Asian cinema. She also taught as French instructor for the Fall and Winter quarter. She is currently at work on her prospectus, exams and translation project. This year. she was the recipient of our Graduate Essay Prize.
GRADUATE NEWS
Graduate Students, continued... MAUREEN WINTER spent the 20192020 academic year in France as a fellow of the Paris Program in Critical Theory. She completed her first dissertation chapter entitled “Walking in the New Wave; Varda’s promeneuses” and is beginning a second chapter on gesture and the domestic sphere in the cinema of Chantal Akerman. In the Spring, Maureen gave a talk on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of gesture as part of Paris 3’s Causeries Critiques workshop series. She then planned to attend the ACLA conference in Chicago, where she would have presented a paper on theatricality and gesture in Agamben and Deleuze. Additionally, she had been accepted to present at the Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference in Prague this summer, where she would have given a talk about László Nemes’s film Son of Saul, politics, and the powers of the false. She will soon publish an essay entitled “In Defense of (a Marxist) Agamben; Coronavirus and Bare Life” as part of the Buffet Institute’s “Living with Plagues Project”. In her free time Maureen has been working on a literary and critical theory zine called “Bruit”, whose first issue will be printed in the fall. This year she will continue to live in Paris and continue to take part in the Paris Program in Critical Theory workshop.
GRADUATE NEWS
New Graduate Program Assistant LISA BYRNES has lived in Evanston for ten years. She has a background in
education with specialties in special education and literacy education. She has an interest in cooking, being outdoors, and enjoys spending time with her family. She is grateful for being part of the Department of French and Italian and is thankful for the patience the department has given her while learning her new role during quarantining with her 4 kids and husband! We wanted to share our favorite family crepe recipe:
1 egg 1/4 c flour 2 T milk 1/4 tsp vanilla * add more milk if you want batter to be thinner.
Mix all eggs first, then whisk in flour and then milk and vanilla. I think it is less lumpy in this order. 1 recipe makes 2 crepes, double as needed. Our favorite toppings include, Nutella, whip cream, jam, fresh fruit or cinnamon sugar. Enjoy!
GRADUATE NEWS 16
GRADUATE NEWS
Dissertation by RACHEL GRIMM, Defended in May, 2020 Directed by Nasrin Qader THE AFTERLIVES OF AMNESIA: Remembering the Algerian War of Independence in Contemporary France and Algeria, 1999–2019 This dissertation examines the mutually constitutive relationship between historiography, collective memory, and cultural narratives in the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954– 1962) in present-day France and Algeria. Taking the turn of the twenty-first century as its point of departure, the study analyzes modern cultural and media representations of the Algerian War to demonstrate the sustained traumatic impact of the anti-colonial conflict in contemporary France and Algeria. Integrating methodological approaches from history, memory studies, and literary and cultural criticism, the interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry highlights the complex nexus of narratives that have coalesced around the Franco-Algerian conflict in a postcolonial context. Furthermore, by calling attention to points of contact and historical complicity between the Algerian War and other histories of violence over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the transhistorical perspective of this study plots the transmission and transformation of its memory over time and in discrete spatiotemporal arrangements. Situating the singular case of the Algerian War within a set of scholarly conversations about the cultural representation of historical trauma, this dissertation makes an important contribution to the study of postcolonial memory and its transnational migrations. Marc Riboud, c. 1962
“Femmes de la révolution”
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Marc Riboud, c. 1962
LOUISE CAROLINE BARBOSA GRADUATE NEWS received her B.A. from Eastern New Graduate Students Michigan University’s Honors College with a double major in English and French. She then continued her studies at The University of Chicago, where she received a Masters in the Humanities from the Two-Year Language Option Program. Her thesis examined Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, in which she studied how both the church of Notre Dame and the female protagonist La Esmeralda were victims of unidimensional interpretations that simplified and deformed their characters. Prior to joining Northwestern, she spent a year teaching English in Dinard, France, which is in her favorite region of Bretagne. Her current research is at the intersection of gender studies, 17th century French literature, fairy tales, and female narratives. GUILLAUME DE BROUX is a PhD student in the Department of French & Italian, as well as a Mellon fellow in Global Avant-Garde and Modernist studies. His research interests center around the ways in which the interplay of reason and passion pushed artistic production to unprecedented heights in early modern France, with a focus on how the dynamics of court life helped shape new ethics of pleasure. Influenced by his formative years spent between Florida and Europe, where he earned a BSc in International Relations from the University of London, he also continues to explore his love of foreign languages and cultures through trying to deepen his understanding of contemporary Japan.
ANNE-MARIE KOMMERS is a graduate student in the Department of French & Italian. She studied French, Spanish, and Irish Gaelic as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, where she received a B.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures with a minor in Irish Language and Literature. Her senior thesis explored the figure of the palimpsest in the writings of Marcel Proust and Jorge Luis Borges. At Northwestern, she is broadly interested in pursuing work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, particularly as it relates to history. Other interests include the essay genre and the nineteenth-century short story. Anne-Marie is a Mellon cluster fellow in Global Avant-garde and Modernist Studies at Northwestern. NYI NYI OHN MYINT received his B.A. from Bard College and his M.A. from Columbia University in French Studies. He is a Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies Mellon cluster fellow at Northwestern. Currently, he is interested in the directionality of prepositions in philosophical literature (for example, Nietzsche’s over/under, Bergson’s within, or Proust’s inside/outside) and its implications for the search for truth. Related to this, in considering Kant’s theory of noumenal affection, he is also curious to learn more about the limitations of language and perception concerning writing. Some of his other interests include mysticism and the problem of description in religious experience, the event of literature, the latency of disruption in the everyday, the uses and misuses of idleness, pseudoscience as a critical approach to literary interpretation, literature as religion, image as text, and the relationship between writing, procrastination, and death. AMANDA PARRAGUEZ is a graduate student in French and Francophone Studies. She received both of her Bachelor degrees in Applied Modern Language and in English from the University of Strasbourg. Then she pursued an MA in French and Francophone Studies at Syracuse University and graduated in 2020. During her master’s degree she focused on journeys of identity as well as liminal spaces and experiences in twentieth century French and Francophone literature by relying on psychoanalytical and psychosocial theories in particular. She’s interested in pursuing her work on postwar literature by women with authors like Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute or Marguerite Duras.
GRADUATE NEWS 18
FEATURED ALUMNA Nathalie Etoké
In this year’s newsletter, we celebrate the achievements of NATHALIE ETOKE, a 2006 graduate of Northwestern’s PhD program who went on to teach at Brown University and Connecticut College before landing, this year, her current position as Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY (The City University of New York), in Manhattan. Nathalie specializes in literature and cinema of Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, black French studies, queer studies in Africa and the Caribbean, and Africana existential thought. Her research examines the ongoing struggles for social justice and freedom for people of African descent around the world, accounting for the consequences of racial slavery, colonialism, and sexual violence in the longue durée of imperialism since 1492. Her articles have appeared in Research in African Literatures, French Politics and Culture, Nouvelles Études Francophones, Présence Francophone, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. She is the author of L’Écriture du corps féminin dans la littérature de l’Afrique francophone au sud du Sahara and Melancholia Africana : L’indispensable dépassement de la condition noire (2010), which won the 2012 Franz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. In 2011, she directed Afro Diasporic French Identities, a documentary on race, identity and citizenship in contemporary France. Her most recent book, Shades of Black (forthcoming in 2021 from Seagull Books), surveys different figures of contemporary “black” identity, from culture to politics, in relation to the problem of freedom. Nathalie was kind enough to take time away from her busy schedule to respond to this interview in September, 2020. Doris L. Garraway
19 FEATURED ALUMNA
What role did your doctoral training at Northwestern play in the direction of your scholarship? I came to Northwestern with a classical French training in the study of literature. I had already written two theses (Master I and Master II, which was called DEA back then). I knew I could write. However, I had not been exposed to “theory” in the American sense of the term. Learning to read, understand, and use theory played a major role in the direction of my scholarship. At first, it was very intimidating and overwhelming. Frankly, I did not like it. But once I started working on my dissertation, I realized how Foucault’s analyses on Power or the body or Derrida’s deconstruction as a critical reading method could be extremely useful. I also read African American feminist writers such as June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker. My training at Northwestern taught me how to develop my transdisciplinary skills and make good use of various theoretical
frameworks. I was never told not to “do X, Y or Z.” On the contrary, Northwestern University helped me develop my interests in different fields of study. My dissertation advisor, Mireille Rosello, always brought the best out of me. We worked very well together. In many ways, she also taught me how to be a good reader and a better writer. Professor Doris Garraway also helped me find ways to better explain my research. She is very meticulous. Her feedback on my cover letters throughout the years has been simply priceless. How do you make time to do creative work (write novels, make films), in addition to writing academic books? I don’t know. I take short breaks from writing academic books. My documentary, Afro Diasporic French Identities, is part of my research on race and citizenship in France. I have always been interested in filmmaking. Once I was able to secure some funding, I went to Paris one summer and within
FEATURED ALUMNA Nathalie Etoké
a month, I had a team of committed people shooting the documentary. The editing process took more time because I was busy teaching in the US while my production was in France. However, we were done in less than a year. The last time I wrote fiction, it was a short story because a good friend of mine was editing an anthology and demanded that I contribute. I have not written fiction in a while. I am not sure I will return to it any time soon. I have lots of ideas in my head. All I need is time to focus on my writing. I usually write during the summer. I also turn conference papers into book chapters or articles. I can write for a month-anda-half straight. Once I have a solid draft the editing work can start and I do not rush it. Because my research is related to my teaching, I use the classroom to explore ideas and read. Therefore I do not start the writing process from scratch.
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Screengrab from Afro Diasporic French Identities (2011)
FEATURED ALUMNA 20
FEATURED ALUMNA Nathalie Etoké
In your 2010 book, Melancholia
Africana, which has just been translated into English, you propose a theory of melancholy to describe how African descended peoples negotiate the tension between loss and newness, or reinvention, in the diasporic setting, whether colonial or postcolonial. Can you share how you came to this formulation, and how this concept helps to illuminate the varied cultural productions of the writers that you study? Once I was done with my dissertation I had time to read just for the sake of reading. During my last year at Northwestern I came across Freud’s article Mourning and Melancholia. Melancholia africana is a concept that helps me look at the cultural representations of black life through the lenses of a continuous tension between loss and newness that is indissociable from “le dur devoir de vivre.” Contrary to the Freudian approach, melancholia africana does not lead to the mental suicide of African descended peoples. In this context, transatlantic slavery, colonization, and postcolonization are objective, tangible, and implacable points of reference. Instead of paralyzing African-descended peoples in a permanent victimization, they force them to act, to reinvent, to be reborn from their ashes. What is your number one goal in your research right now? I do not know if I have a number one goal. I submitted two book chapters with a book proposal to a publisher a couple of weeks ago; I am waiting to hear back from them. In the wake of the death of George Floyd, France was rudely awakened from historic amnesia. Several protests against racism and police brutality occurred in Paris during the summer. I recently started to work on a research project that examines the current conflict between the advocates of black French identity politics and the guardians of French universalism.
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Melancholia Africana: L’indispensable dépassement de la condition noire. 2010
How have your impressions of American academia changed over time, since you began your graduate studies? The job market is very difficult. The graduate students I work with are very anxious about their future. The Graduate Center tries to highlight the professional accomplishments of former students who work outside of academia. Last year, a student who applied to our PhD program asked me during a meeting what we were doing to train and expose students to professional opportunities outside of academia. When I was at Northwestern, I did not
have such concerns. I never thought about not working in academia. I have been teaching since 2006. Throughout the years, I realized that my interests outside of my field helped me teach classes that the institution needed. I had a home department but I also belonged to several programs, and many of my courses were cross-listed. I welcomed opportunities to teach outside of my department. In the small liberal arts college where I taught for 9 years, upper level courses in French often had enrollment issues. Being able to teach first year seminars, Black existentialism, LGBTQI courses, or Introduction to Race and Ethnicity saved me from unnecessary stress and nurtured my interests in those disciplines while giving me access to a
broader student population that only spoke English. I was also a member of several hiring committees. Most liberal colleges want their faculty in foreign languages and literature to be part of centers or programs where they will not teach languages but other topics in the humanities. This was not the case when I started teaching in 2006.
FEATURED ALUMNA Nathalie Etoké
What advice would you give graduate students in our program to help them launch a successful academic career? Honestly, I never had a career plan. I was a visiting assistant professor at Brown University for three years. My first position was a precarious one. However, I was able to get a tenure track position and went up for early tenure, which I received within three years at Connecticut College. My only advice would be to find research topics that you are passionate about, teach about what matters to you as much as possible, and write about it. Although I was always extremely busy with administrative duties in my previous institution, I kept on writing and applying for jobs to challenge myself. Rejection is part of the learning process. I used every campus interview or peer-review feedback on articles as opportunities to improve. With that said, identify your research interests in your discipline and outside of it, don’t get complacent or comfortable, develop honest and trustful relationships with your professors. I met Professor Doris Garraway in 2006. She was on my dissertation committee, wrote numerous recommendation letters for me, and always provided constructive criticism on everything I wrote: CV, cover letters, writing samples etc. When I had two job offers a couple of years ago. She and another senior faculty that I have known for more than a decade helped me a lot. I am very grateful for the role they played in my academic journey. It is very important to have senior faculty whom you trust.
above left: Un Amour Sans Papiers. Paris: Editions Cultures Croisées, 1999. above right: L’écriture du corps féminin dans la littérature de l’Afrique francophone au Sud du Sahara. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010. below: Shades of Black. translated by Gila Walker, Seagull Books, forthcoming 2021.
FEATURED ALUMNA 22
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS Lyonel Trouillot causerie
In collaboration with the Consulat général de France in New York and Chicago, our department welcomed celebrated Haitian writer Lyonel Trouillot to Northwestern on November 18, 2019, for a causerie hosted by Doris Garraway on the topic “Écrire en pays occupé [writing in an occupied country].” Trouillot is an award-winning poet, journalist, literature professor, and author of thirteen novels, two essays and a book of poetry. His novel La belle amour humaine was shortlisted for the Goncourt in 2011 and received the Grand Prix du Roman Métis (2011), the Geneva Book Fair Literary Prize (2012), and the Gitanjali Literary Prize (2012). That same year, he was awarded the Prix Wepler for his novel Yanvalou pour Charlie, and in 2013, he was awarded the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde for Parabole du failli. Inspired by his novel Kannjawou, which explores the complex realities and historical memory of foreign occupation in Haiti—be it military, political, or “humanitarian”-the conversation ranged widely from Trouillot’s literary influences and family heritage to the predicament of the writer in contemporary Haiti and the Haitian national memory of the first U.S. occupation. The event was held over lunch and attracted a robust and diverse audience of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates, many of whom engaged with the author during the Q and A. We are grateful to M. Trouillot and the Consulat général de France for making this event possible, and to all who attended for the lively conversation. Doris L. Garraway
23 EVENTS
Le département de F R A N ÇA I S E T D ’ I TA L I E N prés ente
ÉCRIRE EN PAYS OCCUPÉ A conversation with Haitian Writer
LYONEL TROUILLOT Lundi le 18 novembre, 12h00-1h30
Crowe Hall 1-132
LE
DÉJEUNER SERA SERVI .
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS
Merriem Bahri lecture
The Department of French & Italian presents
17 t h a n d 18 t h C e n t u r y
St a g e C o s t u m e s a t t h e Fr e n ch C o u r t
a lecture by
MERIEM BAHRI Tuesday, January 28th 4:00pm Kresge Hall 1515
We were very happy to host a visit by French and Tunisian costume designer Merriem Bahri on January 28th. After completing a PhD in science at the Université de Lille in 2010, Bahri moved to Chicago, where she turned definitively to her great passion for costumes and art history. She first brought her designing skills to Haymarket Opera Company, a Chicago based opera company, in 2011, then to the Boston Early Music Festival, in 2013). Since then, she’s been continuously working with them, while collaborating with institutions as prestigious as the Beethoven Festival, the Laboratory School, Wheaton College, Elements Contemporary Ballet, Balam Dance Theater, International Voices Project, the Joffrey Academy of Dance, Ensemble Dal Niente, Nordic Baroque Dancers (Sweden), and Opera Lafayette (Washington DC). She has been praised by the press for her « gorgeous and evocative », « spectacular » and « sumptuous array of period-perfect » costumes (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, respectively). Bahri is also an illustrator providing unique, custommade drawings under the name of WERIEM. Her program at Northwestern included two lectures, one in French 272, the introductory course on French Theater, and the other in the FRIT Department. In her first talk, Bahri addressed the emergence of ballet and then opera (imported from Italy) in 17th-century France and emphasized the importance of costume and gesture in those two theatrical genres as well as in comedy and tragedy. She then presented the most significant costume designers of the time, from Daniel Rabel (1578-1637) to Henri de Gissey (1621-1673) and Jean Bérain (1640-1711). In her second talk, Bahri focused on the recurrent character of the Fury in early modern opera to highlight the evolution of costume design from the early 17th century to the 18th century. Providing numberous of illustrations, she highlighted how stage costumes tended to look increasingly similar to clothes worn daily at Court, especially after the end of the reign of King Louis the 14th. She finally showed how she designed her own Furies for a contemporary production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas by Haymarket Opera, in 2013. Matthieu Dupas
EVENTS 24
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS
Departmental Forum on COVID-19
DEPARTMENTAL FORUM ON COVID-19:
QUESTIONS AND REFLECTIONS ON THE PANDEMIC On Thursday, May 21 at 3:30 pm, the Department of French and Italian hosted one of the few NU events dedicated to the COVID pandemic that was organized outside the confines of the sciences or the Buffett Center discussion series on the topic. Entitled “Forum on COVID-19: questions and reflections on the pandemic,” the event featured opening comments by four faculty members— MARGARET DEMPSTER, PAOLA NASTI, CYNTHIA NAZARIAN, and SCOTT DURHAM— followed by a general discussion moderated by DORIS L. GARRAWAY. As the global COVID-19 pandemic has brought about severe disruptions to social and behavioral norms, the economy, and our professional and personal lives, many of us found ourselves looking for interlocutors for the most pressing questions and concerns we have about the crisis.
The purpose of the event was to offer students, faculty, and staff in our department an opportunity to engage informally as a community on any number of issues relating to the pandemic, its wide-ranging impacts, local and global responses, and potential coping strategies, with specific emphasis on the ways in which French and Italian culture can inform our current debate. Through their illuminating presentations, Professors Dempster, Nasti, Nazarian, and Durham demonstrated how the practice of cultural analysis and critique, and the history of Francophone and Italian cultural production, provide useful tools and models for making sense of these challenging times. Doris L. Garraway
Reflecting for the Covid event I came to the realisation that
perhaps in the Decameron Boccaccio wrote stories that
are larger than life because
‘normality’ had come to a halt during the plague and reminding oneself of what life is about is an essential part of survival and resilience.
Paola Nasti
25 EVENTS
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS
Slides from Paola Nasti's Presentation:
Departmental Forum on COVID-19
THE APOCALYPSE
On all sides is sorrow; everywhere is fear. I would, my brother, that I had never been born, or, at least, had died before these times. How will posterity believe that there has been a time when without the lightnings of heaven or the fires of earth, without wars or other visible slaughter, not this or that part of the earth, but well-nigh the whole globe, has remained without
inhabitants. When has any such thing been even heard or seen; in what annals has it ever been read that houses were left vacant, cities deserted, the country neglected, the fields too small for the dead and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth?... - Petrarch, Summer 1348
THE BREAKDOWN OF HUMAN BONDS AND MORAL LAWS
...Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them. By so doing, each one thought he would secure his own safety. One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbour troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs.
N A R R AT I V E S
• Storytelling is deployed as a response to epidemic disease, and operates as a mode of escape and distraction = consolation
A S
C O N S O L AT I O N
• Is distraction the only aim of the author?
• How does the plague re-direct the narrative and the interpretation of the stories collected?
EVENTS 26
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS Graduate Student Colloquia
27 EVENTS
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS Graduate Student Colloquia
GRADUATE STUDENT COLLOQUIUM FEATURING
RACHEL GRIMM & MAUREEN WINTER RACHEL GRIMM received a B.A. in French, along with a B.A. in English, from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University in 2012. Her undergraduate thesis incorporated postcolonial, feminist, and performance theory to analyze identity as performance in two major works by lesbian Franco-Algerian author Nina Bouraoui. Before coming to Northwestern in 2013, she taught English for a year in Pau in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques region of southwestern France. Her current research interests include postcolonial North Africa, identity politics in France, gender as a way of signifying relationships of power, and Arabic. MAUREEN WINTER completed undergraduate work at Goucher College and received her MA in French Studies from New York University in 2014. Her dissertation considers the artistic representation and philosophical analysis of gesture in works by Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean Genet, and Chantal Akerman. As a concept that responds to the problem of how expression is related to bodies, gesture is both a tool for close reading and a dense theoretical knot that holds together pressing questions about language and image, object and subject, and passivity and activity. Of particular interest to the project as it theorizes gesture in relation to art and politics are works by Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Georges Didi-Huberman. Winter also has a broader interest in Marxist theory and politics, feminisms, and psychoanalysis.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2020
10:00 am ZOOM
EVENTS 28
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS Fall Party
Guillaume Lacroix, Consul General of France, Dominique Licops, and Doris Garraway
We kicked off the academic year 2019-20 on Friday, October 4 with a Fall Party in honor of DOMINIQUE LICOPS. She was decorated with the one of the last active noble ranks in France—Knight in the Order of the Academic Palms—in recognition of her outstanding teaching and professional outreach. Officiating at the ceremony was a very special guest—the Consul General of France, Guillaume Lacroix—who made time in his busy schedule to come to Northwestern to confer the insignia of the Palmes Académiques on Dominique. In his remarks, the Consul General thanked Dominique for the excellence that she has demonstrated as Director of French Language Programs at Northwestern, and for the contributions she has made to the broader profession by training and mentoring French language instructors across the Midwest. In receiving this honor, Dominique takes her place as the latest in a long line of distinguished faculty from our department who have also received this honor, including MICHAL GINSBURG, BILL PADEN, MARIE-SIMONE PAVLOVICH, JANINE SPENCER, MARGOT STEINHART, and NASRIN QADER, several of whom joined us for the occasion. Following the official ceremony, members of the department shared a sit-down dinner. Among those present for the event were Dean Adrian Randolph and Associate Dean Mary Finn. Congratulations, Dominique, on being a modern-day knight! Doris L. Garaway
Dominique Licops and Guillaume Lacroix
29 EVENTS
FRIT Chevaliers dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques: Nasrin Qader, Janine Spencer, Dominique Licops, William Paden
DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS Winter and Spring Parties
Spring 2020 Undergraduate PARTY!
EVENTS 30
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
Senior Thesis by MICHELLE GUO Directed by Matthieu Dupas LES VIES PARALLÈLES DE L'ABBÉ DE CHOISY ET HERCULINE BARBIN: Tracer l'histoire du genre et de la sexualité dans les mémoires prémodernes et modernes
François-Timoléon de Choisy
The transition into modernity is often associated with increased tolerance for varied gender expressions and sexual identities. Meanwhile, two memoirs challenge this train of thought in their depictions of exploration and transcendence of the gender-sex binary. The abbot de Choisy, born in 1644, serves as our premodern example: as a young man, his affinity for dressing as a woman brought reprobation at times, but never enough to keep him from pursuing a fruitful life as a member of the Academie francaise and Louis XIV's inner circle. Two centuries later, Herculine Barbin was born intersex in 1838 and lived early life as a girl, until medical experts and the court system reassigned her as male according to supposed biological evidence. Forced her to live under an identity she never agreed with, Barbin committed suicide at age 29. This regression over time can be read through the lenses of Michel Foucault's history of sexuality and Thomas Laqueur's theory of one-sex and two-sex bodies. The emergence of an omnipresent, normative influence governing people's private sexual lives, in addition to an increased reliance on a scientific body of knowledge whose empiricism masks the underlying political interests driving its own production, turn Barbin's modernity into a hostile environment where identities that threaten to subvert the "natural" order are manipulated into compliance using tools far subtler and more effective than anything that existed in the abbot de Choisy's pre-modern context.
Check out the FRIT website for brand new videos highlighting the Undergraduate French and Italian programs! frenchanditalian.northwestern.edu
31 UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
La Table Française
Professors Viot-Southard and Dempster at La Table Francaise in Allision Dining Hall, Fall Quarter 2019
Please join us
12:15 PM
Have lunch at the Table Française, while also practicing your French language skills, meeting other French speakers, and getting to know your fellow students and professors in a casual (virtual) setting.
at
ß
ß
Please contact the Department of
FRENCH & ITALIAN
french-italian@northwestern.edu
for
ZOOM info
For information about the French Table lunches, contact Margaret Dempster.
TABLE FRANÇAISE IS ONLINE IN 2020-2021! Have lunch while also practicing your French language skills, meeting other French speakers, and getting to know your fellow students and professors in a casual (virtual) setting! for ZOOM info contact the Department of FRENCH & ITALIAN french-italian@northwestern.edu
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS 32
Interested in learning about
STUDY ABROAD
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS French Undergraduate Events
STUDY ABROAD in countries? in FRANCE/FRANCOPHONE countries? Interested Interested in learning about
Come hear about fellow students’ students’ study study meet new new abroad experiences, meet people, and have have lunch lunch on on us! us!
Tuesday Tuesday th th
February 4 12:00-2:00pm Kresge Hall 2351 Brought to to you you by by Le Le Cercle Cercle Francophone Francophone and Brought and the the Department Department of of French French && Italian Italian
33 UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
French Undergraduate Events
Students at the French major/minor pizza social
Professors Nazarian, Dempster, and Licops at the French major/minor pizza social
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS 34
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
It has been a pleasure to serve this year as interim Director of Undergraduate Studies in Italian. It was a challenging year, yet successful for all. All students in our classes produced first-class work. At the Undergraduate Awards Ceremony, which took place the end of the academic year, the following students were awarded the “Outstanding Achievement in Italian”: Cameron Barnes (elementary Italian), Mao Gurney (intermediate Italian), Archit Gupta (intensive Italian), and Kevin Lay (200-level in Italian). In addition, at the French and Italian Commencement Celebration the accomplishments and the success of our three minors--Andrew Bowen, Rachel Fimbianti, and Aaron Funes--were recognized.
Message from the DUS in Italian
All our students participated enthusiastically in the extracurricular activities that our faculty generously organized. Among them there was a field trip to the International Film Festival in Chicago for the screening of “Bangla” (October 2019) and a field trip to the performance of “Cavalleria Rusticana” conducted by maestro Riccardo Muti at the Chicago Symphony Center (February 2020). A warm thank you goes to Andrew Bowen and Julia Loverde, who served as Student Advisory Board representatives. Also, special thanks to our two tutors: Rachel Fimbianti, who graduated in the winter, and Melanie De Vincentis, who will continue to work with us during this upcoming year as a volunteer. The warmest welcome to our new faculty member, MASSIMILIANO DELFINO and to PAOLA NASTI, Director of Undergraduate Studies for next academic year.
Paola Morgavi Director of Undergraduate Studies in Italian
Chicago Symphony Center, Winter Quarter 2020
35 UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
UNDERGRADUATE SWEN ETAUNEWS DARG ItalianstUndergraduate nedutS etaudarG Events weN
PAOLA MORGAVI, DANIELA POZZI PAVAN, LINDSAY EUFUSIA, and a group of Northwestern students participated in Gara ai Fornelli in November, 2019. This was the first cooking competition organized by the Italian School Enrico Fermi and the Italian Consulate with the objective to promote Italian culture in Chicago. A team of Northwestern’s students competed against teams from University of Chicago, De Paul University, Loyola, and UIC to prepare a typical Italian recipe. It was a wonderful opportunity for our students to meet students in Italian from different institutions, Italian chefs, part of the Italian community in Chicago, as well as receive their awards from the Consulate of Italy. These off-campus events were great occasions to create a strong community, converse with students and share with them the Italian culture outside of a classroom setting.
Check out the FRIT website for brand new videos highlighting the Undergraduate French and Italian programs! frenchanditalian.northwestern.edu
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS 36
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS Italian Film Screenings
28 gennaio 2020
9 marzo 2020
22 ottobre 2019
DANIELA POZZI PAVAN was granted a WCAS Course Enhancement Grant to bring students to the Chicago International Film Festival to watch “Bangla� by Phaim Bhuiyan. Thanks to this romantic comedy, students could delve into the world and everyday life of a second-generation immigrant from Bangladesh, born in Rome and perceive the difficulties encountered by the main character to juggle his family traditions, his beliefs and the traditions of his native city, Rome. After the movie, students had the unique opportunity to meet with the director, ask him questions and discuss the movie and his experience.
37 UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
Le Ciné Club
17 octobre 2019
31 octobre 2019
CINÉ CLUB IS ONLINE IN 2020-2021! (B.Y.O. refreshments :)
Please contact the Department for more information. The department’s Ciné Club screens three to four free movies per quarter, followed by a short discussion with refreshments. If you are interested, please sign up for our listserv by sending an e-mail to french-italian@northwestern.edu
5 décembre 2019
2 février 2020
For upcoming screenings search “Ciné-Club” on PlanIt Purple
27 février 2020
23 janvier 2020
12 mars 2020
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS 38
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS Rosa la Rose
Rosa la Rose 2019-20
ROSA LA ROSE is the French & Italian literary magazine featuring studentsubmitted writing, poetry, artwork, and photography. Unfortunately, for the first time in more than a decade, we were not able to produce a printed version for 2019-2020, but Professor MARIE-THÉRÈSE PENT was able to collect some of our students exceptional work for a presentation at the department’s Spring End-of-Year Undergraduate celebration. Included here are a couple selections from that presentation.
Forum 7: Écrit Poétique Je suis perdue. J’essaie de me frayer un chemin à travers le monde, mais c’est impossible puisque je ne peux pas me trouver moi-même. J’ai le sentiment d’être prisonnière dans un corps. Nous devons réaliser que nous en sommes tous prisonniers. Notre corps est comme un costume que nous portons, mais que nous ne pouvons pas nous en déshabiller. Nos âmes, nos esprits, et nos pensées habitent à l’intérieur de nous-mêmes, dans nos costumes. Mon corps est comme un filtre, je crie mes pensées et je vois des images vives à travers mes yeux, mais ma voix ne passe pas à travers ma gorge, mes cordes vocales, ma bouche, mes lèvres. Quand je vois le monde qui passe autour de moi, j’ai très envie de mettre un lambeau de moi dans chaque personne que je croise. Je veux voir ce qu’ils voient, je veux écouter ce qu’ils écoutent, je veux penser ce qu’ils pensent. J’ai envie d’être sans limite, irrépressible. J’ai toutes mes pensées et mes idées, mais elles sont gâchées. Beaucoup de potentiels jetés. Je comprends que mon corps est une protection, mais en même temps, c’est une barrière. Simultanément une bénédiction et une malédiction, une circonstance dialectique. A quoi ça sert d’avoir une opinion, d’avoir une pensée unique quand je ne peux pas l’exprimer sans crainte d’être jugée ? Sans crainte d’être rejetée ? SHAUNMEI LIM / Professor Marie-Thérèse Pent
39 UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
Rosa la Rose
La terre meurt et qu’est-ce qu’on fait ? On ne fait rien. Elle nous héberge. Elle nous nourrit. Sans merci. Et on ne s’occupe même pas d’elle. Elle ne reçoit que de l’abus. Regardez ! Elle brûle ! Elle étouffe ! Notre avarice, notre insouciance, nos polluants l’assassinent. Mais on ignore la souffrance de la terre, de notre mère. Elle saigne et tous ses autres enfants saignent avec elle. Tragédie partout ! Comment agit-on sans souci pour nos frères et sœurs ? Les espèces comme l’ours blanc, l’éléphant, le panda qui disparaissent à cause de nous. On les prive de nourriture, de maison, d’air respirable. Mais ce n’est pas notre faute ! Pas notre responsabilité. Pas un vrai problème. On continue de profiter des fruits de notre terre d’une manière insoutenable. C’est une question de commodité. La terre chauffe mais peu importe ! On a la climatisation. Nouvelle voiture. Nouvelle maison. Nouveau portable. On consomme de plus en plus. Mais d’où viennent les ressources et l’énergie nécessaires pour fabriquer ces appareils ? Le prix dépasse un milliard. On se comporte comme des enfants niant les conséquences de nos actes et nos choix. Quelle ironie ! Parce que nos enfants ne verront pas la beauté de ce monde si on continue de dévaster la terre. La mer belle, bleue, et pleine de vie, se noie dans les bouteilles plastiques et les produits chimiques. Les coraux, beaux comme des jardins sousmarins, se dégradent. Les forêts immenses et magiques brûlent, tandis que tous ceux qui y logent brûlent aussi. Faites attention ! Changez vos comportements ! Manifestez ! Votez ! Sinon on perdra tout ce qui nous est cher. KYRA LIN / Professor Katia Viot-Southard
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS 40
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS 2019-2020 Award Winners
CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2019-2020 UNDERGRADUATE AWARD WINNERS! Cameron Barnes Outstanding Achievement in Italian 101 Mao Gurney Outstanding Achievement in Italian 102 Archit Gupta Outstanding Achievement 133/134 Kevin Lai Outstanding Achievement in Italian 200 Stephanie Chee Distinguished Essay in English on a French subject (200 and 300 level) Debussy: Rejecting the Label of Impressionism (French 276, Professor Rosner) Ian Myers 2nd year language (upper 100 level) La Dichotomie entre Lucas et Daxiat dans LeDernier métro (French 125-3, Professor Scarampi) Bengi Rwabuhemba 3rd year language (200 level) Les matins avec ma grand-mère (French202, Professor Rey) Pablo Griswold Morales 3rd year literature (200 level) Les Le^res chinoises (French 271,Professor Licops) Andrew Vuong 4th year language (300 level) Le jour parfait (French 302, Professor Rey) Lily Himmelman 4th year literature (300 level) La Représentation du Rôle des Femmes dans leSiècle des Lumières (French 346, Prof. Romanowski) Mar ta Amador French for Professions Les systèmes de santé suisse et espagnol” (French309, Professor Raymond) Michelle Guo Honors Thesis Les vies parallèles de l’abbé de Choisy etHerculine Barbin : Tracer l’histoire du genre et de la sexualité dans les mémoires prémodernes etmodernes
41 UNDERGRADUATE NEWS
AT U L AT I R G O N N O S C
DE PARTME N T O F FRENCH & I TALI A N
CLASS OF 2020! FRENCH MAJORS • Keyla Carvalho • Jonathan deBruin • Regina Fricton • Jack Funk • • Rachael Goldberg • Lilliana Graham • Michelle Guo • Lily Himmelman • Madina Jenks • Katherine Kent • Jessica Paridis •
FRENCH MINORS • Tara Bhargava • Rachel Cantor • Graham Cromley • John Eichenlaub • Katelyn Evans • • Marisa Hattler • Jacob Holland • Michele Huang • Cailyn Johnson • Jordan Kaluza • • Isabella Ko • Akhil Madan • Brooke Mahoney • Phillips McLaughlin • Lydia O’Connell • Cassandra Pent • Ella Perrault • Alanna Ramquist • Sophie Rodosky • Sydney Summerlin • • Etienne Tishman • Jonathan Toussaint • James Walker • Cristabella Wolf • ITALIAN MINORS • Andrew Bowen • Rachel Fimbianti • Aaron Funes •
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS 42
THANK YOU TO OUR DONORS!
Your generous support and contributions help make possible all that we do. Thank you.
DEPARTMENT ADMINISTRATION 2019-2020 Doris L. Garraway
Department Chair
Nasrin Qader
Director Graduate Studies in French
Cynthia Nazarian
Director Undergraduate Studies in French
Paola Morgavi
Interim Director Undergraduate Studies in Italian and Director of Italian Language Program
Dominique Licops
Director of French Language Program
DEPARTMENT STAFF Liz Murray
Department Administrator
Phil Hoskins
Program Assistant
Lisa Byrnes
Graduate Program Assistant
www.frenchanditalian.northwestern.edu
french-italian@northwestern.edu 847.491.5490
1860 Campus Drive, Crowe Hall 2-107, Evanston, IL, 60208
Northwestern University
THE DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH & ITALIAN