Associate Professor of French
Director of Undergraduate Studies
mld2027@columbia.edu
502 Philosophy Hall
(212) 854-9874
I received my B.A. in Philosophy and French from Oxford University in 1988 and my Ph.D. from Yale University in 1994. I taught at Tulane University in New Orleans from 1994-2002. In 2002 I joined Columbia as Associate Professor of French, and Chair of the Center for French and Francophone Studies. I have served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Columbia’s French programs from 2002-2009.
Teaching and Research
My teaching and research areas include French colonialism and orientalism, francophone literature of the Maghreb and Caribbean, Islam and/in Europe, and Eighteenth-Century French literature and culture.
Current Projects
I am currently completing a book titled Trading Places: Colonialism and Culture in Old Regime France, an interdisciplinary study of the impact of colonialism on pre-Revolutionary French culture and literature. I have just finished an article titled “Invisible Exodus: the Cultural Effacement of Antillean Migration,” and I am now at work on a paper titled “Translation and the Contact Zone: Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits,” for the conference, “The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: from Galland to Burton,” which will be held at the Clark Library, Los Angeles, in October 2005. My two current editing projects are a special issue of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, “Africans in France/France in Africa,” which I am co-editing with Rebecca Saunders, and which is scheduled to appear in June, 2006, and French Moves. Performance, language and Identity in the Francophone World, a volume of essays based on conference held at Columbia University, March, 2004, which I am compiling with Felicia McCarren.
I am co-organizing, with Antoine Compagnon, Laïcité/Secularism, 1905-2005 , a two-day conference examining the separation of church and state in France at its 100 th anniversary.
Books:
Foreign Bodies. Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford University Press, 2001); Reissued in paper, 2003
Smothered Words (Northwestern University Press, 1998)
Translation of: Sarah Kofman. Paroles suffoquées (Galilée, 1987)
Book Chapters and Articles
“Orientalism, Colonialism and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France,” forthcoming in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century, eds. Kathryn Norberg and Dena Goodman ( London and New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006)
“Sarah Kofman,” Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, ed. John Protevi ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005)
“The Critical Method of Madelyn Gutwirth,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35, 2005
“Duc de Saint-Simon,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, French Enlightenment volume (313), ed. Samia Spencer ( London and Detroit: Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, 2005)
"Francophone Studies and the Linguistic Diversity of the Maghreb,” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23:1, 2003
“Gender and the Heritage Genre: Popular Feminism Turns to History,” in Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, eds. Suzanne Rodin Pucci and James Thompson ( State University of New York Press, 2003)
“Literature and Colonialism: the Case for Cultural Studies,” Studies in Early Modern France vol. 6, 2001
Forum Essay on the Enlightenment and Slavery, Newsletter of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies , December 1998, 4-5
“Exotic Economies and Colonial History in the Esprit des lois,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 362, 1998, 145-167
“Violence à l’origine, violence et identité dans La Vie de Marianne,” in Violence et Fictionjusqu’à la révolution, eds. Martine Debaisieux and Gabrielle Verdier (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998), 303-311
“Romantic Psychology and Kantian Ethics in the novels of Isabelle de Charrière,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10:3, April 1998, 303-324
“Sarah Kofman’s Paroles suffoquées: Autobiography, History and Writing ‘After Auschwitz’,” French Forum 22: 3, September 1997, 319-341
“La Rhétorique du rapprochement dans l’Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem,” Revue des sciences humaines 247, July-September 1997, 63-87
“Graffigny’s Writing Subject: Language and Identity in the Lettres d’une Péruvienne,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 38:2, 1997, 99-117
“Montesquieu’s Political Fictions: Oriental Despotism and the Representation of the Feminine,” Transactions of the Ninth International Congress on the Enlightenment, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 348, 1996, 1336-1339
“‘Langage inconnu’: Montesquieu, Graffigny and the language of Exile,” Romanic Review 87: 2, March 1996, 209-224
“Embodying Oriental Women: Representation and Voyeurism in Montesquieu, Montagu and Ingres,” Cincinnati Romance Review XIII, 1994, 51-60
“‘The Woman as Look and the Woman as Voice’: Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar,” Constructions IX, 1994, 89-105
Book Reviews
Tyler Stovall and Georges Van den Abbeele eds., French Civilization and its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race ( New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) Forthcoming in Romanic Review
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. ( London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13:4, July 2001, 620-622
Deutscher, Penelope and Oliver, Kelly eds. Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman. (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1999) Women’s Philosophy Review, 2000
Letzter, Jacqueline. Intellectual Tacking: Questions of Education in the Works of Isabelle de Charrière . (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1998), Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11: 3, April 1999, 373-375
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