French & Italian

CONTENTS

Faculty news

Guillaume Ansart published two articles this year, "Aspects of Rationality in Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville" in Diderot Studies and "Imaginary Encounters with the New World: Native American Utopias in Eighteenth-Century French Novels" in Utopian Studies. Ansart and Laurent Dykedspotter were both awarded tenure this year and will be promoted to the rank of associate professor next year. Congratulations to both of them!

Julie Auger was awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant for a project titled "Morphosyntactic Variation in Picard." She also co-edited with Andrea Word-Allbritton a volume of articles on sociolinguistics, The CVC of Sociolinguistics: Contact, Variation, and Culture, published by the IU Linguistics Club. Julie gave invited presentations at the University of Toronto, the University of Georgia, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She participated in roundtable sessions at the International Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies and at the annual Indiana Canadian Studies Roundtable. She also presented papers at the ninth annual Department of French and Italian GSO Colloquium, at the first International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (Universitat Pompeu, Barcelona), at the Première Rencontre Fribourgeoise de la Linguistique de Corpus Appliquée aux Langues Romanes (Universität Freiburg), at the third International Symposium on Bilingualism (Bristol), and at the 31st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (University of Illinois at Chicago). She published her first text in Picard in the 20th anniversary issue of Ch'Lanchron (a trimestrial magazine entirely in Picard) and was interviewed in an article by Susan Williams in the IU Home Pages: "The connections of language, thought and social structure."

Michael Berkvam continues as the director of graduate studies in French literature. He is a member of the Honors College faculty and the faculty of West European Studies. He has also published a book with the University Press of the South, Writing the Story of France in World War II: Literature and memory, 1942-1958. Last year, he was promoted to the rank of full professor. Many congratulations!

During the first part of 2000, Gil Chaitin was on research leave as a member and NEH fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. He worked there on his book, Fictions of Universal Education in the French Third Republic, 1880-1905, which deals with the effect of the Ferry educational reforms on the sense of national identity as seen in four major novels of the period. He and his wife, Joy, had the opportunity to visit museums in New York and see several theater productions. Joy took part in the Children's Theatre workshop and made contact with an arts-oriented high school. She returned there in March 2001 to organize a staged reading of her latest children's musical. Her play has also had a staged reading in Paris and will be produced at the Monroe County Public Library this November. Upon Gil's return in August 2000, he was especially pleased to find that his zest for teaching had been renewed by his long stay away. Meanwhile, Joy and Gil's daughter, Sharon, graduated from Cornell summa cum laude in spring 2000, spent the summer perfecting her Chinese in Beijing, and then enrolled in a masters program at Harvard.

Margot Gray continues to work at revising her book manuscript, "Stolen Limelight: Display, Excess, and the Feminine in Modern French and Francophone Literature." She also enjoyed presenting a paper on Elsa Triolet at the 20th-Century French Studies Colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania, where she attended a costume ball as Beckett's elusive Godot. She also joined the board of the French Language and Literature Advanced Placement Exams and particularly enjoyed the board's first meeting in Paris. Margot and Oscar Kenshur are looking forward to swapping houses for a month this summer with Dominique Paul, a former exchange student in our department from Lille.

Leonard Hinds published two articles this year, "The World As Pattern, Picture, and Harmony in Charles Sorel's Science universelle" in Studi francesi and "'Honni soit qui mal y pense' I: Avowals, Accusations, and Witnessing in the Trial of Théophile de Viau" in Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature. His book manuscript, Narrative Transformations from "L'Astrée" to "Le Berger extravagant," was accepted by Purdue University Press and is now being prepared for publication. Last summer, Hinds started his second book project, a critical edition of the anonymous, libertine novel Le Parasite Mormon, with the assistance of a Lester J. Cappon Fellowship for Documentary Editing from the Newberry Library in Chicago. He was invited back by the Newberry Library to give a Fellows Colloquium talk about his research on bookmaking and libertine fiction. He also delivered two papers on Le Parasite at the Modern Language Association Convention in Washington, D.C., and at the 29th annual French Literature Conference in Columbia, S.C. This past fall, Leonard and our new colleague, Rebecca Wilkin, hosted the 19th annual conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary French 17th-Century Studies.

Professor Emeritus of French and former chair Quentin Hope published his book Saint Evremond and His Friends with Droz. He also published an article on La Rochefoucauld in Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature and is preparing another one on the same writer.

Eileen Julien's recent article in Yale French Studies "Terrains de rencontre: Césaire, Fanon, and Wright on Culture and Decolonization" was cited in the Jan. 12, 2001 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has been invited to speak at the University of Iowa and at the Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures. Her topic will be her current research on Sénégal and West Africa, "Modernity and Multiple Imaginaries in Literature and the Arts."

On Dec. 12, 2000, Edoardo A. Lebano, professor emeritus of Italian, went to Rome as a guest of the Italian government to take part in the First International Congress of Italians Residing Outside of Italy. He is currently teaching M453 20th-Century Italian Culture and Literature, while still serving as director of undergraduate studies in Italian. Last July he lectured at the Italian School of Middlebury College, and next summer he will go back to Vermont to teach a three-week graduate seminar. During the annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Italian held in Treviso/Venice, he organized and chaired a tripartite section on Italian Renaissance Epic.

After completing her term as resident director of the year-abroad program in Aix-en-Provence, Rosemary Lloyd and her husband, Paul, stayed on through July for the Music Festival in Aix. They had the joy of watching the conducting of Simon Rattle, Pierre Boulez, and William Christie, as well as seeing the incomparable Anne-Sophie von Otter play Nero in Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea. The fall semester was enlivened for her by a Topics course she taught on problems of narration, point of view, and history. As a central theme in the course, she used encounters between Europeans and Aboriginals in Australian literature. She and Paul returned to Australia for Christmas, escaping the cold of Bloomington and returning before the real heat got going in South Australia. Her research has been largely focused on three new projects, the most advanced being a book on Baudelaire. She is also preparing a study of the relationship between fixed form verse and free verse in 19th-century France. Her book on Stéphane Mallarmé was selected by Choice as one of the best academic books of the year. She was also awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Initiative Fund of the University President's Office. Congratulations go to Rosemary!

Emanuel Mickel finished Vol. 3 of The Enfances Godefroi and Le Retour de Cornumarant, part of the 10-volume Old French Crusade Cycle. This year the co-editor of the entire cycle, Jan Nelson, will finish Vol. 4, The Chanson d'Antioche, which will complete the 10-volume undertaking begun as the dream of two assistant professors in 1966. Mickel also read a paper at the 53rd annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conference on selected paintings and poetry in 19th-century France. He will pursue the same idea in museums in France and Great Britain.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Italian Mark Musa published the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, Vol. 3, Purgatory: Italian Text and Verse Translation and Vol. 4, Commentary with the IU Press last year. These represent the middle volumes of his six-volume translation.

Last August, Daniel O'Sullivan and his family moved here from Massachusetts, where he received his PhD from Boston College. He is continuing as a visiting lecturer and is enjoying life in Bloomington. Currently he is writing a book on Marian devotion in 13th-century French poetry and pursuing research on the representation of children in medieval literature. At the 12th annual Purdue Conference on Romance Languages, Literature, and Film, he presented a paper on "Revisiting Mouvance and Medieval Lyric Performance" (forth coming in the Spring issue of Romance Languages Annual), and he presented "I, Theophilus: Metaphor, Synecdoche, and Rutebeuf's Miracle de Théophile" at the 36th International Congress of Medieval Studies this May. He was also a guest lecturer in a graduate medieval music class, where he gave a presentation on troubadours, trobairitz, and trouvères.

As he enters his 41st year as a faculty member of FRIT, Albert Valdman continues to serve as director of language instruction to insure the maintenance of the Basic French Program's outstanding record for elementary and intermediate French instruction and, especially, the training of prospective college-level teachers of French language and prospective coordinators of language teaching programs. In collaboration with three alumni Cathy Pons (North Carolina-Asheville), Sarah Jourdain (SUNY-Stony Brook), and Mel Scullen (Maryland) he is completing the revision of the first-year college French text, Chez nous: Introduction au monde francophone. Valdman is continuing work on two major lexicographic and lexicological projects. First, Kevin Rottet (Wisconsin-Whitewater) and Barry Ancelet (former AI in French, alumnus in Folklore) are collaborating with Joe Price, Lisa Klueppel, and Tamara Lindner on the NEH-funded project, whose objectives include preparing a dictionary of Louisiana French (Cajun) and a computerized contemporary oral corpus disseminated on CD-ROM. The second project, supported by the U.S. Department of Education Title VI program, is to establish twin databases in order to generate computerized oral and text corpora of Haitian Creole and bilingual dictionaries: Creole-English, French-Creole, and Creole-French. A major event was Valdman's participation in the joint congress of the Fédération Internationale des Professeurs de Français and the AATF in Paris in July 2000, where he delivered a plenary session paper on standardization in Haitian and joined alumna Cynthia Fox (SUNY Albany) in a session on French-speaking communities of the United States.

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Last updated: October 16, 2001
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