Assistant Professor of French Receives NHPRC-Mellon Planning Grant to Create Digital Edition of Global Antislavery Periodical
The Revue des Colonies was published in France between 1834 and 1842.
Research in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures is interdisciplinary and vibrant.
Faculty and graduate students pursue research in numerous fields of study.
This book explores modern political and intellectual movements to protect local languages and cultures in the Sinophone world. The first half of the twentieth century saw East Asia-wide pressure to suppress and erase local languages in favor of enforcing national and colonial languages. This book analyzes language activism in Japan-occupied Taiwan, British Hong Kong, and Northwestern China by situating it in a pan-regional anti-colonial consciousness that sought to protect indigeneity from nationalism and imperialism.
This volume is the first to focus on teaching about Haiti’s complex history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Making broad connections between Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, contributors provide pedagogical guidance on how to approach the country from different lenses in course curricula. They offer practical suggestions, theories on a wide variety of texts, examples of syllabi, and classroom experiences. Teaching Haiti dispels stereotypes associating Haiti with disaster, poverty, and negative ideas of Vodou, going beyond the simplistic neocolonial, imperialist, and racist descriptions often found in literary and historical accounts. Instructors in diverse subject areas discuss ways of reshaping old narratives through women’s and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture, and they advocate for including Haiti in American and Latin American studies courses.
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Co-edited with Karine Bertrand (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada), this special issue focuses on the tensions between local, national and transnational as they are expressed, and shape Québec cinema and (new) media since 2000. Re-examining the role of nationalism within Québec evolving culture, exploring increasingly diverse and inclusive representations of Québec, and constantly redefining what it means to be "Québécois," Québec cinema and (new) media are evolving under the influence of new global tendencies while remaining deeply preoccupied with defining and redefining itself.
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Browne’s analysis of the film Opera Aoi, which premiered at Hyper Japan in London in 2014, reveals the artistic possibilities and limitations of the combination of bunraku puppetry and Vocaloid music within the film. She argues that Opera Aoi suggests that these technologies, whether the centuries old bunraku or the 21st century Vocaloid, requires a human element to reach its expressive potential.
This invited conference at the Université de Bretagne in May 2021 examined the transnational experience of Raoul de Roussy de Sales, who covered events in the United States for the French press at the beginning of World War II. A bi-national French/American writer and intellectual, Roussy became an influential figure in France-United States cultural and diplomatic relations. As the author of articles published in The Atlantic Monthly and other north American outlets, he provided a bi-cultural view on the American experience. A version of this conference will be published in proceedings in 2022.
More specifically, this article examines the thematic and aesthetics implications of ennui in Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu Dors Nicole (2014) and Rafael Ouellet’s Gurov & Anna (2014) to better understand this new trend in the post-referendum Quebec context of the new millennium, which is simultaneously marked by weariness in the face of the question of national sovereignty, and an acceleration of cultural and economic globalization. To do so, I will first look at how ennui shapes films from the Quebec New Wave; I will then see how the films Tu Dors Nicole and Gurov & Anna both approach the question of ennui differently by questioning concepts of realism, reality, fantasy, and fiction; and finally I will explore the centrality of ennui in the Quebec New Wave in connection with the current socio-political conjuncture of Quebec. Full reference: “Cinéma indé et esthétique de l’ennui dans le renouveau du cinéma québécois,” Contemporary French Civilization, vol. 44, nos. 2-3, 2019, pp. 201-219.
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