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French Studies Program Faculty

French Faculty

Claire Menard

Claire Ménard obtained her PhD from Rutgers University and Paris 8 in September 2016. She is nowa lecturer in French in the Department of Romance Studies. She received a Maîtrise in Anglophone Studies from the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, France, in 2007. After spending a year as a French intern at Colgate University and a summer at the French school at Middlebury College, she decided to continue her academic career in the U.S. and obtained a M.A in French Literature from Miami University, Ohio, in 2009. She spent the following year as a Teaching Associate at Brown University before applying to the doctoral program at Rutgers, New Brunswick, NJ.

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Philip Lewis

Philip Lewis joined the faculty of Romance Studies in the fall of 1968. A graduate of Davidson College, he received a Ph.D. in French Literature from Yale, where he was a Woodrow Wilson fellow and a Danforth fellow. He has subsequently received fellowships from the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the Camargo Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. After receiving academic tenure in 1974, he served as Department Chair for six years. Between 1976 and 1987–with a break in the middle to visit Berkeley as Professor of French–he served as Editor ofDiacritics.

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Richard Klein

Richard Klein, Professor Emeritus of French Literature, is the author ofCigarettes are Sublime(Duke), a cultural history of cigarettes, which has been translated into 14 languages. This book, like his more recentEat Fat(Pantheon), is designed to bring the insights of critical theory to bear on contemporary social issues. More recently, he has publishedJewelry Talks: A Novel Thesis(Pantheon), a fictional memoir and a theory of personal ornamentation, which takes many of its categories from the use of jewelry as a figure in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French poetry. Professor Klein teaches poetry, modernism, and contemporary French thought. For many years he has been an Editor ofdiacritics, a journal of critical theory produced by the Department of Romance Studies. His most recent graduate seminar was devoted to Oulipo, the post-War group of authors in Paris whose formalist experiments in literary expression have grown increasingly influential. Professor Klein has an ongoing interest in the work of Jacques Derrida. Klein has recently focused his attention on troubadour poetry, written in Old Occitan, with its legacy of courtly love. His interests extend to the social and ideological conflicts out of which that poetry arose and declined in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

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Flavien Glidja

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Nelly Furman

Nelly Furman retired from Cornell in 2004 to become Director of the Office of Programs and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) at the Modern Language Association (MLA) in New York City

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Alice Colby-Hall

Alice Colby-Hall, Professor of French Literature, received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and, though officially retired, continues to teach courses on medieval French literature and to direct research in this area. Her interests include the Old French epic, courtly romance, the history of the French language, and Old Occitan (Old Provençal) literature. She is the author ofThe Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature: An Example of the Stylistic Originality of Chrétien de Troyes(1965) and of many articles concerning the origins of the epics of the William of Orange Cycle. In 1997, she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. At present, she is completing a book entitled Guillaume d’Orange et les légendes épiques de la basse vallée du Rhone.

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Morrison’s son visits campus for film screening

The son of Toni Morrison M.A. ’55, will visit campus Nov. 9 for a film screening and discussion of “The Foreigner’s Home,” a documentary based on Morrison’s monthlong guest-curated 2006 series of cultural events at the Louvre.

Two students wearing lab coats examining a beaker of something yellow in a lab.

New A&S program expands undergrad research opportunities

The Nexus Scholars program will leverage the student-to-faculty ratio and the vibrant research enterprise in A&S to expand opportunities for students, while also enhancing the culture of collaborative scholarship at Cornell.

Laurent Ferri

Laurent Ferri currently serves as Curator of the pre-1800 Collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, aka RMC. Before joining Cornell as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2006, he was conservateur du patrimoine at the French National Archives (2000-5). He also taught regularly, especially as Visiting Professor at the Ecole nationale d’administration in Rabat, Morocco, and at the Ecole nationale des chartes in Paris. At Cornell, he is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and a Member of the Graduate Field in Medieval Studies. A former student of Michel Pastoureau, he has authored one book and eighteen articles.

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Marie-Claire Vallois

Marie-Claire Vallois, Associate Professor of French Literature, received her doctorate from the University of Nice. She teaches courses in French literature, French Culture, and Women's Studies. Her research is devoted mainly to the eighteenth century and the Age of the Revolution, with critical interests in semiotics and narratology, history and ideology and French and Francophone theories and practices of feminism. Author of a book on Germaine de Stael, Fictions feminines: Mme de Stael et les voix de la sybille, Vallois is presently completing another book, Displacing Femininity: Women, Gender, and the Revolution (1650-1850).

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Enzo Traverso

Enzo Traverso is a historian of modern and contemporary Europe. His research focuses on the intellectual history and the political ideas of the twentieth century. War, fascism, genocide, revolution, and collective memory are the landmarks of his numerous books. He was born in Italy, studied history at the University of Genoa and received his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 1989. Before coming to Cornell in 2013, he taught political science for twenty years in France. He has been a visiting professor in several European and Latin American universities. His authored books are translated into more than fifteen languages, and he has contributed to many collected works and. Beyond his books, Traverso’s articles and reviews have been published in History & Theory, Constellations, Historical Materialism, South Atlantic Quarterly, October, Totalitarian Movements & Political Religions, Revue française de science politique, Raisons politiques, Storia e storiografia, Contemporanea, Pasajes, Acta Poetica. He has received several awards for his historical essays, including the Premio Pozzale, Empoli, Florence (2014); the Premio Lo Straniero/Gli Asini, Lecce (2018); and the Premio Napoli (2022). His political commentaries have appeared in journals and magazines such as Jacobin, Salvage, La Quinzaine littéraire, Contretemps, Lignes, L’Espill, Nueva Sociedad, and the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto.

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Thierry Torea

Thierry did hisundergraduate studies in Avignon (France) in English literature and FLE (FSL,Frenchas a second language). At SUNY Cortland, he graduated in foreign language teaching in French with a BA and a master's degree inScience of Education. He has taught at variousinstitutions: SUNYCortland, Hobart and William Smith, Wells College, and, currently, Cornell University.Hecompleted a DML (doctorate in modern languages) in second language acquisition/teaching methodology at Middlebury College.

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Damien Tissot

Research

Damien Tissot is a senior lecturer in the Romance Studies Department and a faculty fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in Gender Studies and Philosophy from Paris 8 University Vincennes – Saint-Denis. His dissertation, titled “Feminism and Universalism: Toward a Common Definition of Justice,” combines his interests in gender studies and philosophy. Through the lens of feminist theory and postcolonial critique, it provides a genealogy of the idea of universalism and explores the ways in which it has been used in feminist claims for justice.

His research interests include theories of care and ethics, theories of justice, Paul Ricoeur, feminist and postcolonial theory, ecofeminism, dialogues between American and French feminisms, transnational feminist alliances, and translation studies. He is currently preparing a book on the various uses of the notion of caring within ecofeminist theory. His work has appeared in Philosophy Today, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Multitudes, Les Ateliers de l’Ethique, and Etudes Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies. He is also the translator of Silvia Federici’s book Revolution at Point Zero : Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Common Notions/PM Press, Oakland, CA, 2012.

Teaching

Damien has taught French as a Foreign Language as well as Francophone Literature and Culture in a wide variety of contexts around the world. He is particularly interested in the use of technology in the classroom, community engaged learning, and the use of philosophy and theory in teaching languages. He is also interested in graduate students’ and instructors’ training.

Courses Taught

FREN 1210 – Elementary French
FREN 1220 – Elementary French**
FREN 1230 – Continuing French
FREN 2090 – French Intermediate I : Composition and Conversation**
FREN 2095 – French Intermediate II : Composition and Conversation**
FREN 2180 – Advanced French**
FREN 2310 – Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture**
FREN 3430 – French and Francophone Travel Literature**
FREN 3950 – French Feminisms**
FREN 3960 – French and Francophone Philosophies**
**courses designed

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Karen Pinkus

Karen Pinkus is a Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. She is also a minor graduate field member in Studio Art and a Faculty Fellow of theAtkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. In addition to scholarly work, she has participated in a number of visual art projects in areas of her interests.

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Magali Molinie

Magali Molinie is Adjunct Associate Professor of French in the Department of Romance Studies, a member of the International Research Network “Word Gender in Translation”, and of the French Studies Program at Cornell.

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Alumni gift to A&S supports doctoral students in the humanities

A $5 million alumni gift will help to support doctoral students in humanities fields within the College of Arts & Sciences.

Nexus Scholars Program applications now open

The program connects undergraduates in A&S with opportunities to work side by side on research with Cornell faculty from across the College.

Tracy McNulty

Tracy McNulty, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, received her BA in French and English from U.C. Berkeley and her PhD in Comparative Literature from U.C. Irvine. Her research interests include 20th-century French literature and comparative modernism, psychoanalytic theory (especially Freud and Lacan), contemporary French philosophy, and political theory. In addition to these fields, she regularly teaches interdisciplinary courses on such questions as the origins of language, myth and symbolic thought, eroticism and perversion, and philosophical, scientific, and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and human agency. Her first book,The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity,was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007. Her second,Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life(a defense of the liberating function of formal and written constraints in psychoanalysis, political theory, and aesthetics), came out with Columbia University Press in 2014. Currently she is completing two new books. Libertine Mathematics: Perversions of the Linguistic Turnjuxtaposes masterpieces of the libertine tradition by the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the Comte de Lautréamont, and Pauline Réage–each of which can be read as promoting a “language of the real” that would allow for an integral transmission of the drive—alongside contemporary theoretical works that have embraced the language of mathematical formalization—or of other non-signifying languages—either as an ultimate extension of, or as a rejection or overturning of, the so-called “linguistic turn” in twentieth century thought: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and the “speculative realists, and in a different way Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. A fourth book project, currently nearing completion, is concerned with the role of the body in relaying an unconscious transmission from one person, or one people, to another; it deals with examples from the psychoanalytic clinic, the procedure of the Pass that Lacan invented as a means of guaranteeing that an analysis has reached its term, and the stakes of bodily and affective transmission in mass psychology, revolutionary populism, and political aesthetics.

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Kathleen Perry Long

Author of two books, Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard and Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, and more than fifty articles and book chapters, Kathleen Long now focuses her work on early modern theories of gender and of non-normative corporealities. Her particular interests are in the relationship between gender, bodily, and behavioral norms and early modern theories of political order, as well as the circulation of very different ideas concerning natural variation’s crucial role in human survival and thriving. She teaches courses on disability studies, religious violence in literature from the crusades to the Algerian War of Independence, and monsters. She is the editor of three volumes: High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France; Religious Differences in France; and Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe, and co-editor for a series on Monsters and Marvels: Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Amsterdam University Press). Her current projects include a translation into English of The Island of Hermaphrodites (L’isle des hermaphrodites), a monograph on literature in the wake of the French Wars of Religion (Bringing up the Dead), and a study of early modern theories of disability and gender difference, The Premodern Postnormal.

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