Sonya Stephens
• Professor of French
• Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education
Office: Ballantine Hall
608
Office phone: 855-0034
Vice Provost's Office: Maxwell Hall 100
VPUE phone: 855-8783
Email: sonsteph @indiana.edu
Research areas:
Nineteenth-century French literature and culture; literary criticism and theory; literature and the visual arts.
Education:
- PhD, French, University of Cambridge, 1990
- MA, Études françaises, Université de Montréal, 1987
- BA, Modern and Medieval Languages (French & Spanish), University of Cambridge, 1986
Background:
My teaching and research focus primarily on nineteenth-century French literature and culture. I have a particular interest in the inter-relationship of different cultural forms, especially literature and the visual arts, and in theoretical perspectives on this. My book on Baudelaire’s prose poetry explores poetic and narrative form and its relation to the production of meaning. Although I continue to work on Baudelaire, especially the illustrated editions of Les Fleurs du Mal, and on modern French poetry more generally, my recent work has focused more broadly on literature and culture of the nineteenth century and the way it explores unfinishedness. I am currently completing a book entitled The Art of the Unfinished: Process in Nineteenth-Century France. I am also working on a collaborative research project on the journalist Jules Claretie’s La Vie à Paris (1880-1913). In addition to teaching nineteenth-century French literature and culture, I teach a course on translation from and into French.
Selected awards:
- Indiana University Summer Faculty Fellowship
- Fellowship, University of Connecticut Humanities Institute
- Fellow, Higher Education Academy (UK)
- Fellow, Royal Society of Arts
Courses recently taught:
- Le roman au XIXe siècle: fiction, récit, histoire
- Great Poetry of the Nineteenth-Century
- Seminar in Literature and the Arts: Problèmes de représentation au XIXe siècle
- Roman et poésie: L’écriture du moi
- Reading and Expression in French. Amours et passions: L’écriture du désir
Publication highlights:
Books
Esquisses/Ébauches. Projects and Pre-Texts in Nineteenth-Century French Culture, edited by Sonya Stephens (New York, Peter Lang, 2007)
A History of Women’s Writing in France, edited by Sonya Stephens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Articles and book chapters
‘Transpositions in the cultural field’, Romance Studies, 26 (3), July 2008, 198-209.
'Painting (in) the studio: artful unfinishedness?’, in Ebauches/Esquisses: Projects and Pre-Texts in Nineteenth-Century France. (Peter Lang, 2007)
Introduction, in Sonya
Stephens, ed., Ebauches/Esquisses:
Projects and Pre-Texts in
Nineteenth-Century France (Peter Lang, 2007), 1-10.
‘Paris and Panoramic
Vision: lieux
de mémoire,
lieux communs’. Modern
and Contemporary France 14, 2 (May 2006), 173-187.
‘Les lectures de l’archilecteur?
Readers of/in the Petits
Poèmes en prose’,
Bulletin baudelairien, 40,
1-2 (2006), 67-82.
‘The Prose Poems’,
in Rosemary Lloyd, ed.,
The
Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
2006) 69-86.
‘Esquisse
d’incomplétude:
Baudelaire, Guys and Modern
Beauty’ Neophilologus,
89 (2005), 527-38.
