Previous Lectures & Events

Co-sponsored Large Events

  • 1991 ICLS Conference (International Courtly Literature Society/co-hosted with UMASS)
  • 1998 International Colloquium on Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (with Five Colleges)

Individual Speakers from 1987 to Present

  • Victor Brombert, "The Prison Symbol in Stnedhal, Dickens and Dostoevsky"
  • Ora Avni, "Silence et vérité chez Louis René Des Forets"
  • Martine Reid, "Stendhal en peinture"
  • Josué Harari, "In the beginning...A reading of Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece"
  • Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Heidegger, Art and Politics"
  • Louis Marin, "Frames and Framing: From the Trecento to Frank Stella"
  • Theodore Norton, "Habermas's Notion of Public Life" (class lecture)
  • Daniel Poirion, "Rhetoric and Reality in the late Middle Ages: Jehan de Saintré, François Villon, Charles d'Orléans"
  • Jacqueline Cerquiligni, "La Cour amoureuse: Rite du désir et amour des signes"
  • Lucien Dällenbach, "Claude Simon: Mirorirs, récit, histoire"
  • Sydney Lévy, "Francis Ponge et les mathématiques"
  • Thomas Kavanagh, "Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance"
  • Judith P. Butler, "Sex/Gender and the Shape of Politics"
  • Sandy Petrey, "Speech Acts and Literary Theory: Austin vs Derrida"
  • Pierre Saint-Amand, "Ethique de la Parure: Maupassant, La Parure"
  • Avital Ronell, "Opera and Technology: Finitude's Score"
  • Peter Brooks, "Invasions of Privacy: The Body in the Novel"
  • Elspeth Kennedy, "The Scribe as Editor"
  • Claude Thomasset, "Medicine in the Middle Ages"
  • Thomas Kavanagh, "Probability Theory and Chance in the Enlightenment"
  • Linda Orr, "Post-Revolutionary Syndrome: Stael, Michelet, Tocqueville"
  • Michael Zink, "The Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes"
  • Lynn Higgins, "Seeing vs Believing: Cinema, Collaboration and Self-Representation in the 80's"
  • Howard Bloch, "New Philologies in Medieval Studies"
  • Wilda Anderson, "Constructing a Terrorist Discourse"
  • C. Jon Delogu, "Todorov on the Fantastic and de Man on Lyric Poetry: Twin Reefs"
  • Daniel Poirion, "La Théâtralité du Roman Médiéval"
  • Kevin Brownlee, "Literary Genealogy and the Problem of the Father: Christine de Pizan and Dante"
  • Georgiana Colville, "Magic Mirrors: The Self-Portraits of Frida Kahlo"
  • Avital Ronell, "The Telephone Book"
  • Milad Doueihi, "The Politics of Simplicity"
  • Giulia Sissa, "Tetaphysics under the Microscope: Experiments on Spontaneous Generation"
  • Suzanne Guerlac, "The Myth of Prose: Reading Writing in Sartre's What is Literature?"
  • Chantal Thomas, "Marie-Antoinette, la dernière reine: Eléments d'une mythologie"
  • François Roustang, "Michaux L'Anonyme"
  • Ann Smock, "Sylvan Voices: Louis-René Des Forêts"
  • Leo Bersani, "Sadism and Film: Freud and Resnais"
  • Jerry Flieger, "Someone to Watch Over Me: The Politics of Post-Modernism, Paranoia and the Hypervisible"
  • Lionel Gossman, "The Sulking Corner of Europe: Anti-Modernism in 19th- Century Basel"
  • Maryse Condé, "The Journey Home: Itinerary of a Guadeloupean Writer"
  • Mitchell Greenberg, "Psychoanalytic Dimensions of the Baroque"
  • Ross Chambers, "Autobiography and Illness"
  • Michel Zink, "Froissart et le Temps"
  • Naomi Shor, "The Crisis of French Universalism" (in conjunction with the 20th-Century French Studies Conference)
  • Jacques Renard, "Blanche et Marie"
  • Jeffrey Stanley, "For Honor Alone: History into Drama"
  • Douglas Kelly, "Apo Koinou, Aging, and Private Reading of the Romance of the Rose"
  • Carlyn Saltman, "Kofi chez les Français"
  • J. Michael Dash, "Resiting Resistance: Francophone Caribbean Literature and the Fin de Siecle"
  • Marcus Cruse, "Medieval manuscript Culture"
  • David Hult, "Alain Chartier's Belle Dame sans mercy"
  • Michel Zink, "Le poète et le prophète dans la littérature médiévale"
  • Jean-Michel Maulpoix, "What About Poetry"
  • Jean-Marie Goulemot, "Voltaire et la laïcité"
  • Richard Stamelman, "The Mystery of Perfume in French Culture"
  • Johann Sadock, "Au-delà due regard: rencontres multiethniques"
  • Kevin Newmark, "Why Poetry Matters: Baudelaire's Future Perfect"
  • Richard J. Golsan, "The Literary Vichy Syndrome: Repetitions, Provocations, Innovations"
  • Maurice Olender, "The Passion for Origins: From Language to Nation"
  • Jean-Marie Teno, Le Mariage d' Alex and Vacances au pays.
  • Peter Brooks, "The Derealization of Self:  Rousseau, Freud, Proust"
  • Jean-Philippe Mathy, "The Debate on Affirmative Action in France"
  • Zineb Ali Benali, "Les femmes d'Algérie et les transformations de la société entre Code de la famille et patriarcat"
  • Keith Busby, "Tales from the Edge:  French Arthurian Romance and the Celt Belt"
  • Sarah Kay, " The Nightingales' Way.  French Poetry in Jean Renart's Guillaume de Dole"
  • Sara Kippur, "The Denial of Self Translation"
  • Katherine Kolb, "Balzac's Fifth Symphony"
  • Norris Lacy, "Arthurian Romance and the Parallax Effect"
  • Pierre Frantz, "Rousseau: Haine du théâtre?"
  • Martine Guyot-Bender, "Art and Reality in Social Film Documentary: Who is Filming? Who is Talking? Who is Watching?"
  • Janet Beizer, "Talking About Food"
  • Richard J. Golsan, "Memories Divided and Reconciled? Reflections on Summer 2014: Remembering WWI and WWII in France Today"
  • Lynn A. Higgins, "Getting from page to Screen: 39 Fragments for a Theory of Adaptation"
  • Deborah T. Long, "Participation Not Invention: The Medieval Model of Writing and Its Purpose Presented by Chrétien de Troyes in Le Conte du Graal"
  • Lisa Haber-Thomson, "Les prisons pour femmes en France au dix-neuvième siècle"
  • Ann Smock, "Loin des bureaux de poste"
  • Thomas Kavanagh, "Une liberté des plaisirs?"
  • Youna Kwak and Raphaël Sigal with Anne Brancky, Yasser Elhariry, Katherine Hornstein, Annabel Kim, Khary Polk, Robert St. Clair, "How Did I Get Here? Humanities in the First Person"
  • Zahia Rahmani, "De l'Algérie à la France: Parcours d'une femme écrivain"
  • Bruno Duarte, "Henri Michaux: Drawing Away from Words"
  • Colette Fellous, "Fabrication de Pièces détachées"
  • Ivan Jablonka, "A History of the Grandparents I Never Had"
  • Pierre Saint-Amand, "Inside the French boudoir: Architecture and Desire in the Eighteenth Century
  • Susan R. Kramer, "Confession, Consent and Illicit Love: Theology and the Twelfth-Century Self"
  • Heidi Brevik-Zender, "Courtesans and Curtains: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione (1837 - 1899)"
  • Laure Murat, "My Way: Crossing the U.S., from Venice to Babylon"
  • Elizabeth Emery, "Of Monsters and Women: Collecting Japanese Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris"

The French Department contributed to the following events:

  • Lecture given by Sada Niang @ Mt. Holyoke College
  • Lecture given by Lynn Hunt @ Hampshire College, "The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette"
  • Lecture given by Robert Aulotte @ Smith College, "La pensée religieuse de Montaigne"
  • Lecture given by Michèle Perret @ UMASS
  • Lecture given by André Jamme @ Smith College
  • Lecture given by Michael Marrus @ Amherst College, "Scholom Schwartzbard and the Assassin's Quest for Justice: Historical and Practical Dilemmas
  • Lecture given by Maryse Condé and Richard Philcox @ Smith College, "Intimate Enemies: A conversation Between and Author and Her Translator"
  • Lecture given by Richard Beban @ Amherst College
  • Lecture given by Lola Lafon @ Smith College
  • Lecture given by Gina Hermann @ Amherst College, "Spanish Women in the Antifascist Resistance in France, 1936-1956"
  • Lecture given by Pap Ndiaye @ Smith College, "The Minority Paradox: Blackness in France"
  • Conference -  “Muslim Women Reclaim their Identities: Being a Muslim Woman in France & the U.S.” @ Amherst College