French & Italian

           Full Professors: 

 

Jean-Godefroy Bidima.  Ph.D. Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Yvonne Arnoult Chair in Francophone Studies. Research includes continental philosophy, literatures and arts of the Francophone world, African philosophies, juridical anthropology and medical ethics. Publications include numerous articles and four books: Théorie critique et modernité négro-africaine: De l'Ecole de Francfort à la "Docta spes africana" (1993); La philosophie négro-africaine (1995); L'art négro-africain (1997); and La palabre: Une juridiction de la parole (1997).

 

Linda Carroll. Ph.D. Harvard. Research interests focus on the interaction between cultural and historical forces in Renaissance Italy. She is particularly concerned by the ways in which popular creative artists and leaders in the economic and political sphere(s) engaged one another to further their goals. A related interest is translating texts of the era. She is translator forVenice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, an anthology of important passages edited by Patricia Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White and published by The Johns Hopkins University Press (2008). She is currently preparing a new edition and translation of the works of Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante). Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante), La prima oratione, edited and translated by Linda L. Carroll. Modern Humanities Research Association Critical Texts Vol. 16. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008.Her articles have appeared recently in  Renaissance Quarterly,  The Psychohistory Review, Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, Sixteenth Century Journal, and numerous conference proceedings.  Professor Carroll received the USG John Stibbs Award for Outstanding Faculty Member in 2007.  Linda Carroll's C.V.

 

Hope Glidden. Ph.D Columbia. Kathryn B. Gore Professor of French. Current research is on critical approaches to Renaissance humanism, cultural property, and human geography as it relates to French identity. A book project entitled Wealth of Nations: Nation, Language, Patrimony in France is in progress. Prof. Glidden has recently taught the following courses: French Feminisms, French poetry and poetics, sixteenth-century French writers, and a seminar on the Beautiful. She has also taught graduate courses on "La Renaissance du patrimoine," sixteenth-century prose (Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne) and French Poetry and Poetics. Articles are forthcoming on laughter in Renaissance texts and on ambiguity as a trope in the Renaissance.

 

Felicia McCarren. Ph.D. Stanford University. Professor. 19th -21st century French, English and comparative literature and literary theory; visual culture and performance; science and technology studies; history of medicine and psychoanalysis; film history and theory; Francophone studies and postcolonial theory. Publications include two books: Dance Pathologies; Performance, Poetics, Medicine (1998) and Dancing Machines; Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2003), articles on performance and cinema in Critical Inquiry and L'Esprit Créateur, and recent work on the cultural impact of immigration, transculturation and technology transfer in France and francophone countries: "Téléphone Arabe: From Child's Play to Terrorism; The Poetics and Politics of Post-colonial Telecommunications," (Journal of Postcolonial Writing) and "52 days to Timbuktu (62 days to Rabat)," (Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture).    

 

Elizabeth Poe. Ph.D. Princeton. Professor. Research interests include troubadour poetry, Occitan narrative, textual transmission, and manuscript studies. Within the Old French literary domain, she has worked on the lais of Marie de France, the fabliaux, and the salut d'amour. She is currently engaged in a project on medieval Occitan grammars. She has published two books: From Poetry to Prose in Old Provençal (1986) and Compilatio: Lyric Texts and Prose Commentary in Troubadour Mansucript H (2000).

 

 

Vaheed Ramazani. Ph.D. University of Virginia.  Professor. 19th-century French literature and culture.  His research is broadly concerned with psychoanalysis, rhetoric, and narrative theory.  His recent publications focus on the articulation of historical trauma through the intersecting tropes of gender and national identity.  His current work examines representations of terrorism and war in contemporary Western media. Professor Ramazani is the author of The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony (University Press of Virginia) and of Writing in Pain:  Literature, History, and the Culture of Denial (Palgrave Macmillan).  His articles have appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Romanic Review, PMLA, Boundary 2, Cultural Critique, SubStance, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

 

 

Associate Professors:

 

Thomas Klingler. Ph.D. Indiana. Associate Professor. Chair. French linguistics; Creole studies; Louisiana French; dialectology; lexicography. Recent publications: If I Could Turn my Tongue Like That: The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana (LSU Press, 2003); "How much Acadian is there in Cajun?" (2009); co-editor, Dictionary of Louisiana French as Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities (University Press of Mississippi, 2009).  

 

Assistant Professors:

 

Fayçal Falaky. Ph.D. New York University. Assistant Professor. 18th-century French literature; psychodynamics of law; political philosophy; Islam and secularism; philosophical vulgarization in 18th-century France and in the present day Arab world. Recent publications include "L'originalité du plagiat," (2009) in FLS and "Iconologie et idolâtrie en Islam : caricatures et figures," (2007) in La Voix du regard.     

 

 

Michael Syrimis. Ph. D. University of Chicago. Assistant Professor. 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature and cinema; early twentieth-century literature and technology; Italian avant-garde and modernism; film theory and history; Pasolini, writer and filmmaker; Italian modernism and classical Hollywood cinema. Recent publications include "From Nestoroff to Garbo: Pirandellian Humor in Its Cinematic Vernacular (2008) in Quaderni d'italianistica, and "Mechanical Giants, Futurist Laughs: From Gazurmah to Deed's Bully" (2009) in Annali d'Italianistica.

 

Visiting Professors

 

Beatrice Arduini is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Italian. She received a Dottorato di Ricerca in History of the Italian Literature and Language from Università degli Studi of Milan, Italy, and a Ph.D. in Italian from Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, especially Dante studies, manuscript and material studies, and textual editing. Her research deals with the problems of textual and cultural reception of works in Italy during the 14 th – 16 th centuries to examine the development of vernacular literary culture before and at the time of the invention of the press. She has published articles on these subjects in Medioevo e Rinascimento and Textual Cultures.

 

Micah True. Ph.D. Duke. Visiting Assistant Professor. 17th century French literature and culture, with particular emphasis on France's relationship to the world outside its borders; travel writing and theory; the intersection of linguistics and politics in encounter narratives; missionary ethnography; theatre in colonial settings. Recent publications include "Maistre et Escolier":  Amerindian Languages and 17th Century French Missionary Politics in the Jesuit Relations from New France," Seventeenth Century French Studies (2009), "Retelling Genesis: The Jesuit Relations and the Wendat Creation Myth," PFSCL (2007) and  "What's in a Name? The Roots of Christian/Islamic Tension in 17th Century France," PFSCL (2006). 

 

Carole Viers-Andronico. Ph.D. UCLA. Visiting Assistant Professor. 19th-21st century French, Italian, English and comparative literature and literary theory; translation studies; philosophies of aesthetics; the cross-over arts: exchanges between the visual arts and literary arts; narrative theory; studies in the novel.  She is a contributor to literary translation journals and has published a review on Hervé le Tellier's study of the literary group OULIPO and its aesthetic philosophy in Comparative Literature.

 

 

Michael Wiedorn. Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania. Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. Research interests include 20th- and 21st-century Francophone literature and philosophy. In particular, his recent work evaluates how the Martinican essayist, poet, philosopher and novelist Edouard Glissant has sought to rewrite radically the Western philosophical tradition. Other interests include the history of continental philosophy, vitalist discourse in French and Francophone writing of the 20th century, feminist theory and cinema. Recent publications include "Desire Without an Object in Glissant's Le Quatrième siècle" (Chapter in Littératures et déchirures, 2008); "Locating the Tout-monde: An Excursus into Glissant's Measure of the World" (Chapter in the forthcoming Modern Philosophies of the Caribbean and Latin America); and a translation entitled "Le lieu de la déconstruction : Derek Attridge et Jean-Michel Rabaté."

 

 

       

Professors of Practice:  

 

Teri Chalmers is a Professor of Practice in Italian.  She received a B.A. in Italian and Linguistics from Newcomb College, an M.A. in Italian from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures from Tulane University, with a minor in French. She has taught beginning and intermediate Italian at Tulane for several years, and has occasionally taught beginning and intermediate French as well.  Her areas of interest are French, Italian and Spanish narratives of the 13th and 14th centuries, language change and acquisition, and translation issues. She is in the final stages of translating an 18th century autobiographical manuscript which describes the travels of a Frenchman from Paris to Saint-Domingue, and then to New Orleans, from 1729 to 1731. Among other things, the author describes the flora and fauna of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River region, the Native American tribes found there, and detailed accounts of life in New Orleans.

 

Richard Cranford is a Professor of Practice in French, is researching espionage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries in view or preparing a study of intrigue in those centuries.

 

 

 

 

Bouchaib Gadir received his B.A. degree in Arabic Language and Literature from the Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines in Casablanca. His Diplôme d'études approfondies in Arabic Language and Literature is from the University of Mohammed V in Rabat. His Diplôme d'études supérieures in Arabic Language and Literature is from the Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines in Casablanca. He has a Ph.D in Francophone Studies from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He worked as an Assistant Professor of Arabic at Virginia Military Institute from 2006 through 2008. He is a former board member of "La Coordination des Chercheurs sur les Littératures Maghrébines et Comparées". His research focuses on language learning theories, Medieval Arabic literature, Polyphony in Modern Arabic novel and Identity and Exile in the Francophone Novel of the Maghreb. 

 

Alexandra Reuber is director of the Language Program and a Professor of Practice in French. She joined the Department of French and Italian in 2006. She received an M.A. in English and French literature from the RWTH-University, Aachen, Germany, and a PhD. in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University. Her specialization is nineteenth-century literature, with special interest in gothic and fantastic writing.  In addition to her various conference presentations she is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the development of the uncanny in nineteenth-century literature.

 

 

Dauphine Sloan is Professor of Practice in Tulane's Department of French and Italian as well as in the Payson Center for International Development.  She teaches courses on French society and institutions, French media, and French language.  At Payson, she teaches international political and economic relations, the history of development since World War II, approaches to sustainable human development, and organizational leadership and management in developing countries. Professor Sloan received her doctorate degree in Sociology from the University of Paris V in 1984, with a specialization in Soviet and East European studies. She was previously Assistant Director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, DC. Subsequently, she managed the ACE Program (Action for Cooperation in the field of Economics) in Brussels, a European Union assistance program for the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, which funded research projects on all aspects of the transition from planned to market economies. 

 

Annette Sojic is a Professor of Practice in French. She joined the Department of French and Italian in  2006.  Her article on Maupassant's tales was published this year in the Cahiers Naturalistes.