Recent Events
Spring 2024 Events
From April 18-20, the CFFS co-hosted 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 gathered 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 affirmed the important contributions of our LSU colleagues and our continued commitment to forging new connections between institutions, individuals and scholarly research networks. See the program here.
On Monday, March 25 from 4:30PM-6:30PM in 324 Hodges, the CFFS hosted author Julia Malye for a creative writing workshop in French.
In this creative writing workshop, students explored the art, ethics, and politics of translation to welcome multilinguism and multiculturalism in our writing. We looked at translation at both the micro and macro levels: thinking about the difficulty of translating one given story, one given word, or one’s culture, one’s world. We learned how (self)translation can be used as atool toward revision, and what the languages we speak/are in the process of learning can teach us about the words we choose and the stories we write. The workshop was intended to allow students to explore creative expression in French, and is open to students from beginning to advanced levels.
Julia Malye is the author of four novels published in France and works as a translator for Les Belles Lettres. She wrote her fourth novel and English debut both in French and in English: Pelican Girls, which is currently being translated in more than 20 languages. At the age of twenty-one, she moved to the United States to study fiction writing and graduated from Oregon State University's MFA program in 2017. Since 2015, she has been teaching creative writing to students both in the U.S. at Oregon State University and in France at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and Sciences Po Paris.
On March 8 from 12-1PM CST, the CFFS hosted a virtual lecture with Dr. Alyssa Sepinwall
(California State University) on her book Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution
in Film and Video Games (University Press of Mississippi 2021). Long silenced in academia, the Haitian Revolution has made some surprising appearances
in popular culture, ranging from a Chris Rock comedy to video games. This talk considered
how these media have portrayed the Haitian Revolution, and the challenges Haitian
artists have in creating their own depictions of the Revolution.
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).
Friday, March 1, in 424 Hodges Hall: Lecture by Michael Monahan, Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis: “From Series Being to Black Liberation: Dessalines, Biko, and Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason.”
Michael Monahan, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, is the author of Creolizing Practices of Freedom (2022) and The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity (2011) and editor of Creolizing Hegel (2017). His primary philosophical interests are in questions of oppression and liberation, with a particular emphasis on race and racism. He draws primarily on Africana and phenomenological texts and traditions in his work. He has taught courses in Africana Philosophy, Philosophy of Race, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Hegel, and Nietzsche. His current work investigates the uses and abuses of theories of "recognition" in the context of racial oppression and liberation.
Co-sponsored by the Department of French Studies and the Center for French and Francophone Studies
On Friday, January 26th, the CFFS hosted "The Craft of Oral History: Best Practices and Lessons from the Louisiana French Project."
Oral histories are a powerful way to collect and preserve stories and personal memories from the past and present. They can teach us about our more immediate communities or families, and also help us to understand the everyday impact of larger historical or social events. In this workshop, Jennifer Cramer (Director of the LSU T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History) and Erin Segura (LSU Louisiana French Instructor) will give an overview of best practices for oral history research, including how to form interview questions, interviewing techniques, using technology, and ethics. They will also discuss the lessons learn from the Louisiana French Oral Histories project.
Fall 2023 Events
The CFFS hosted visits from leading scholars in French and Francophone Studies.
Dr. Jacqueline Couti. Dr. Couti discussed 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.
The CFFS welcomed 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).
Spring 2023 Events
CFFS Introduction to Digital Humanities Workshop
On Friday, April 14, 2023, the CFFS is hosted an introductory workshop led by LSU faculty to learn more about the powerful, accessible computer-based techniques that are changing how we study and understand the humanities. This workshop was open to everyone and was a great introduction for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty.
In this workshop, we:
- Talked about what DH is and how it is changing humanities study.
- Explained the methods and outcomes of exciting DH projects around the web.
- Presented two important currents of DH work, in textual analysis and geospatial mapping.
- Encouraged hands-on experiments with user-friendly DH applications.
- Played a virtual reality video game based on historical research.
This LSU CFFS workshop was facilitated by Professors Lauren Coats (English), Susan Grunewald (History), and Jeffrey Leichman (French). Room is subject to change depending on the level of interest
Mapping Marronage: Towards a Transatlantic Visualization of Freedom with Dr. Annette Joseph-Gabriel
Friday, March 31, 2023
Mapping Marronage is an interactive visualization of the trans-Atlantic networks of intellectual, creative and political exchange created by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th century. It traces the geographic reach, crossings and intersections of letters, testimonies and financial exchanges by enslaved people of African-descent.
Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. She works at the intersection of French and Afro-diasporic culture, literature and politics. Her areas of expertise include Black women’s writings, anti-colonial activism, and slavery in the French Atlantic.
CFFS Virtual Event - Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Information Session
Friday, January 27, 2023
The CFFS hosted an online discussion of research programs and funding opportunities
from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH). The Louisiana Endowment for
the Humanities’ Public Programs team highlighted the ways for French studies and other
humanities scholars to engage with the LEH, including through participation in humanities-focused
public programming, submitting pitches to their flagship magazine, 64 Parishes, writing
scholarly articles for their online encyclopedia, and participating in Institute for
Louisiana Culture and History workshops. This event was open to all members of the
LSU community, as well as the wider public.
Fall 2022 Events
Storytelling the Haitian Past: A Collaborative Lecture with Laurent Dubois and Kaiama
Glover
On Thursday October 20th, 2022, the CFFS hosted Laurent Dubois (John L. Nau Ill Bicentennial Professor of the History & Principles of Democracy and Africana Studies University of Virginia and Kaiama Glover (Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University) who presented their joint work on the complementary relationship between literature and history in Haiti, and how these discourses work together to broaden our understanding of colonialism, resistance, and the pursuit of Black liberation.