Phillip John Usher received his B.A. at the University of London (Royal Holloway) and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is Assistant Professor at Barnard College and has also held visiting appointments at Boston University and in Miami University’s summer program at the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon. His main research focus is sixteenth-century French literature, with particular emphasis on three areas: (1) epic; (2) tragedy; and (3) travel/pilgrim literature. He also has a secondary interest in French film, in particular gendered reading of French film since the 1950s. He is currently working on several projects: a book about the connections between epic literature and the sister arts in sixteenth-century France, a translation of Robert Garnier’s Antigone (1580), as well as two new areas of exploration (work on Ronsard’s secretary, Amadis Jamyn; work on the Arabic origins of Classical texts during the French Renaissance).

Columbia Faculty Homepage

Selected Bibliography

Books

Errance et cohérence : Essai sur la littérature transfrontalière à la Renaissance. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010).

Ronsard's Franciade (1572). A translation with notes and introduction. (New York: AMS Press, 2011).

Virgilian Identities in Early Modern France. Volume co-edited with Isabelle Fernbach (London: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming).

Selected Articles since 2008

"Walking East in the Renaissance." in: Susan Suleiman and Christie McDonald, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 193-206.

"Narrating National Defeat: Recuperative Epic in Renaissance France." in: Romance Studies 28:3, 2010, pp. 169-81.

"De sexe incertain: Masculin, Féminin de Godard." in: French Forum, 34:2, 2009, p. 97-112.

“Prophetic Architecture: Agrippa d’Aubigné in Paris” in: Renaissance Futures, volume edited by Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth, with opening chapter by Peter Burke (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 159-80.

“Maps and Plans” in: Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, edited by Larissa Juliet Taylor (Brill, 2009), pp. 366-73.

"Non haec litora suasit Apollo : la Crète dans la Franciade de Ronsard.” in: La Revue des Amis de Ronsard, no. XXII, May 2009, pp. 65-89.

“Of Mute Dolphins and Taking Leave of Kings: The Praise Poems of Ronsard’s Franciade.” In: Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance LXXI, 2009 no. 1, pp. 61-75.

“Oicoe-gatou : l’altérité linguistique chez Breydenbach et Léry”, in issue on Early Modern Alterity edited by Scott Juall of L’Esprit Créateur, 48:1, Spring 2008, pp. 5-17.