Center for French and Francophone Studies

Fall 2023 Events

The CFFS is delighted to announce upcoming visits from leading scholars in French and Francophone Studies.

Our first guest in Fall 2023 will be Dr. Jacqueline Couti. Dr. Couti will discuss the motifs of déraison and rap(e)ture (aesthetic of rape and rapture) in the Martinican Raphaël Tardon’s short story “La Rédemption de Barbaroux” [“The Redemption of Barbaroux,” 1946] and novel Starkenfirst (1947), in order to demonstrate how this author undermines Western humanism and the colonial project. At the heart of this project stand power and pleasure. Considering this author's representations of women not only as colonial tropes but as appellations d’origine contrôlée (AOC) [“protected designations of origin”] of the imaginary allows us to see how these persistent tropes still cause exclusion and dissension and negatively affect the contemporary French Antilles.

Dr. Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French Studies at Rice University. Her research and teaching interests delve into the transatlantic and transnational interconnections between cultural productions from continental France and its now former colonies. She is the author of Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924-1948 (Liverpool, 2021) and Dangerous Creole Liaisons (Liverpool, 2016), among many other publications. 

Please join us for Professor Couti's lecture on Thursday, September 21 at 4:00 p.m. in the French House Grand Salon. 

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Later in the semester, the CFFS is proud to welcome back to LSU Faith Beasley, Professor of French at Dartmouth College, a noted specialist of seventeenth-century French studies and feminism. Dr. Beasley's lecture, entitled "Contextualizing the Past:  Encounters with India à la française"?" will discuss François Bernier's texts on India (1670-72), as well as their reception and influence. Through these texts and their history, we can learn about the larger history of cultural exchange between India and France during the early modern period, and the importance of reading and interpreting texts within their historical context. Dr. Beasley's most recent monograph, Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de la Sablière and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France (Toronto, 2018), engages with important questions of cultural exchange between France and India during the Early Modern period. In addition to this work, Professor Beasley has long been a leading scholar of women’s writing in seventeenth-century France, including (among many others) editing the volume Options for Teaching Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers (MLA, 2011) and co-editing, with LSU Professor Kate Jensen, Approaches to Teaching the Princess of Clèves (MLA, 1998).

Please join us for Professor Beasley's talk on Thursday, November 9 at 4:00 p.m in French House 135. 

Spring 2024 Events

Save the dates for our spring 2024 events!

On Friday, January 26th, 2024, the CFFS will be hosting a virtual workshop on oral history research methods with Jennifer Cramer, director of the LSU T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, and Erin Segura, anthropology doctoral student and instructor of Louisiana French at LSU. They will discuss the Louisiana French Oral History project and best practices for doing oral history research. 

On March 8th 2024, the CFFS will be hosting a virtual lecture with Dr. Alyssa Sepinwall (California State University).  Professor Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall earned a B.A. in intellectual history and political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Stanford University. Her research specialties include the French and Haitian Revolutions, modern Haitian history, Slavery and Film, French colonialism, French-Jewish history, history and video games, and the history of gender. She is the author of Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (University Press of Mississippi) which received the Honorable Mention for the 2021 HSA biennial Book Prize, Haitian Studies Association and was named a CHOICE Top 10 Editors' Pick). Her previous works include The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (UC Press, 2005; released in paperback, 2021) and Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012).

From April 18th-20th, the CFFS will co-host the conference French and Francophone Philosophy Today with keynotes Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia), Penelope Deutscher (Northwestern), François Raffoul (LSU, emeritus). The conference will include a panel featuring Claire Colebrook (Penn State),  Jeff Bell (Southeastern Louisiana University), and Dan Smith (Purdue)  discussing the work of John Protevi (French/Philosophy, LSU). This conference will gather a diverse set of international researchers, scholars and students to consider the past, present and future directions of French philosophy. Recognizing the precious and precarious francophone connections of the state of Louisiana, and its investments in humanistic traditions tied to French thought and cultures, the conference will seek to affirm the important contributions of our LSU colleagues and our continued commitment to forging new connections between institutions, individuals and scholarly research networks. 

Announcements

Call for LSU CFFS Micro-Grant Proposals:

The CFFS Micro-Grant initiative invites members of the LSU community to convene small-scale intellectual or creative exchanges that illuminate the broad applicability of intellectual and artistic contributions from the French and Francophone world, broadly construed. All members of the LSU community – undergraduates, graduate students, staff, and faculty – are invited to apply, although preference will be given to student and non-TT/early career faculty proposals. Successful proposals will be eligible to receive organizational support from the CFFS in the form of publicity and help securing on-campus spaces, as well as material support for honoraria and refreshments (up to $500). Whenever possible, Micro-Grant activities will be recorded and archived on the CFFS website for future reference. These grants will be administered on a rolling basis.

Learn more and apply at this link.