France and the World

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University This talk will examine the dialectic of universal emancipation and the radical enlightenment, to argue that while these processes were arguably initiated in the Malian Mande Charter of 1222...

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Madeleine Dobie, Columbia University What is at stake in writing about wartime experiences many decades after they occurred? Why and how are such events remembered in a very different social and political context and from a...

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Laure Astourian, Bentley University In the 1950s, strikingly similar images of children playing in the Niger River appeared in three groundbreaking films: René Vautier’s banned Afrique 50 (1950), Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and...

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Kaiama L. Glover, Yale University Professor Kaiama L. Glover will discuss René Depestre’s late novel Popa Singer (2016), a daring work that revisits Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorship, Caribbean revolutionary dreams, and the...

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Danielle Beaujon, University of Illinois Chicago Criminalizing the Casbahs explores how French police officers in Marseille and Algiers associated the spaces they saw as North African—the "Casbahs"—with a particular form of...

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Peter Behrman de Sinéty, École normale supérieure To mark the U.S. release of Pierre Guyotat’s Idiocy , forthcoming from the New York Review Books and newly translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty, join us for an evening of...

NOVEL THEORY SPEAKERS: Margaret Cohen, Stanford University; Christie McDonald, Harvard University "Who Has the Right to Tragedy? This paper discusses the novels of Claire de Duras, the author chosen to represent the 19th century for the French agrégation...

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Peter Szendy, Brown University The lecture will introduce the notion of the readee , the addressee of reading (with all the misdirections that such an address can involve). It will then explore, guided by some passages in...

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Hannah Freed-Thall, New York University Abstract: This talk explores the anti-fascistic potential of curiosity, taking avant-garde artist Claude Cahun as a case study. In 1930, Cahun and their partner Marcel Moore published...

FRANCE AND THE WORLD SPEAKER: Catherine H. Nguyen, Emerson College This year 2025, it will be the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon—or the Liberation of Vietnam to those in Vietnam—and the end of the Vietnam War: April 30th, 1975. Given this, I...