Fabriqué aux USA: American Publishing and Postwar French Literature

FRANCE AND THE WORLD

SPEAKER: Sara Kippur, Wellesley College

This talk explores the surprising ways in which American institutions and cultural figures shaped 20th-century French literature. Drawing on literary archives and other sources from her recent book New York Nouveau: How Postwar French Literature Became American, Kippur demonstrates how editors, translators, and publishers in New York contributed, in pivotal and transformational ways, to the production and reception of French writing, both in the U.S. and in France.

About the speaker

Sara Kippur is Professor of French and Chair of French, Francophone, and Italian Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of New York Nouveau: How Postwar French Literature Became American (Stanford, 2025) and Writing It Twice: Self-translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (Northwestern, 2015), and co-editor of Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture, and Politics Today (Liverpool, 2016). Her articles in the fields of 20th-21st century French literature and translation studies have appeared in such venues as PMLA, MLN, and Yale French Studies.