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

Eliza Zingesser
Assistant Professor, Department of French and Romance Philology, Columbia University
A specialist of medieval French and Occitan literature, Eliza Zingesser is completing a manuscript entitled Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French that documents the act of cultural appropriation constituting a founding moment in French literary history. A second book project, Bird
Talk: Avian Poetics in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, reflects her research interests in animal studies and sound studies.

François Proulx
Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
François Proulx specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature with a larger research focus on gender and sexuality studies. His current book project investigates representations of reading and masculinity in fin-de-siècle France. As a member of the research consortium Proust21, he is also creating a digital critical edition of Marcel Proust’s correspondence.

Chair: Kathrina LaPorta
Postdoctoral Lecturer, Department of French, NYU

Respondent: Joe Johnson
PhD Candidate, Department of French, NYU

Futures of French is a new series highlighting the work of early career scholars.

In English. Free and open to the public.