If we could today—without the burden or benefit of precedent, tradition, or institutional inertia—invent a field called ‘French and Francophone Studies,’ what would it look like?

– Laurent Dubois & Achille Mbembe

Raphaël Sigal

Assistant Professor of French, Department of French, Amherst College

A specialist of twentieth-century French literature and theory, his first book (Reading and Its Double) examines the relationship between legibility, visibility, and interpretation in the works of Antonin Artaud. His second book project (The World in a Book, the Book in a Pocket) is a reflection on books written in and/or about exile in French in the twentieth century.

Catherine Clark

Assistant Professor of French Studies, Department of Global Studies and Languages, MIT

A cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and visual culture with a focus on a social and material history of photographs as historical documents of Paris, her current book project (Paris and the Cliché of History) tells the story of the various uses of photos as documents of the capital’s past, and the theoretical assumptions that underpinned their use.

Chair: Laura Hughes

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, College Core Curriculum, NYU

Respondent: Kaliane Ung

PhD student, Department of French, NYU

Futures of French is a new series highlighting the work of early career scholars. The next meeting will take place on March 23, 2017.

In French and English.

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