Research and Teaching Interests
Reflecting my interdisciplinary training, my research
focuses, broadly, on the cultural and intellectual history of Third Republic
France (spilling backward into the earlier nineteenth century and forward
into the Vichy period). My first book, The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing
Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France (Oxford UP, 1995; and in French
translation, Gyp, la dernière des Mirabeau, Plon-Perrin,
1998), is an intellectual biography of a highly prolific and popular novelist
of the fin de siècle who combined her literary activities
with those of a journalist, playwright, salonnière, and nationalist
political militant. My other research areas include the Dreyfus Affair,
antisemitism, and the history of the book (to which I have devoted a graduate
seminar), especially as it pertains to publishing history and the literary
marketplace of the fin de siècle. My current book project
is a study of bibliomania and bibliophilia at the fin de siècle,
as they relate to other phenomena of that period including dandyism, snobism,
and the industrialization of book production. Because my work is
grounded in both literary and historical studies, I publish in both types
of journals (Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Historical Reflections/Réflexions
historiques) and present papers at both history conferences (Western
Society for French History, French Historical Studies) and those with a
more literary cast (Nineteenth-Century French Studies, MLA).
My courses offer interdsciplinary approaches to
topics in French culture, society and politics from "nos ancêtres
les gaulois" to the present. At the undergraduate level, I teach and/or
have taught "History of French Civilization and Culture," "Contemporary
France," "La Belle Epoque," "The Dreyfus Affair" and freshmen seminars
on human rights in the French context, "Paris 1900" (Spring 2001) and antisemitism
in modern France (funded by donors to the Jewish Studies program at Penn
State, with which I am affiliated). At the graduate level, I have taught
"Approaches to French Civilization," "Research Methods and Bibliography
in French Civilization," "French Civilization, 1715-1870," "La France contemporaine,"
"La Belle Epoque," "Représentations de la Révolution française,"
and "History of the Book in Modern France."
I am currently President of the Association
for French Cultural Studies, an organization which seeks to promote
research and teaching in French civilization and culture in American colleges
and universities. I am also a member of the Modern Language Association's
Executive Committee of the Nineteenth-Century French Literature Division.
For relaxation, I like to watch movies, cook,
and travel. A native New Yorker, I occasionally sneak away to my hometown,
with my husband and my son, Benjamin, for large doses of Indian and Thai
food. |
