Profile

Since arriving at the University of Oregon in the fall of 2013, I have had the opportunity to teach a wide range of French classes for undergraduates and graduate students while participating in the rich intellectual life of the campus.

Courses I have offered include the medieval and Renaissance survey; Renaissance prose, Jeanne d’Arc in literature, history and film; contemporary French culture; and Resistance and collaboration in French and Francophone contexts. This year, I will be offering several new courses, including a survey of modern French literature; “French Kiss: Love and Loss in Literature and Film,” a course in English for non-majors; a seminar on cannibals, witches and monsters in the Renaissance; and “Liberation and Critique,” a course looking at the intersection of psychoanalysis and Marxism in some radical French and Italian theories of sex and gender.

When I arrived at UO, the Italian section of Romance Languages was in the midst of preparing the 2013 conference of the American Association of Italian Studies. I joined the organizing committee and, with Regina Psaki, put together an exhibition of early Italian books and manuscripts from the Knight Library’s Special Collections that opened during the AAIS conference. I also co-founded with Vera Keller of the Honors College a Research Interest Group, the Oregon Rare Book Initiative (ORBI), to promote the study of the history of the book on campus while bringing more attention to the remarkable holdings of Special Collections. We will sponsor talks by UO faculty and extramural speakers. More information as it becomes available will be posted at the ORBI website: http://blogs.uoregon.edu/orbi/.