Futures of French: Beyond French: Occitan, Arabic and the Languages of Poetry

If we could today—without the burden or benefit of precedent, tradition, or institutional inertia—invent a field called ‘French and Francophone Studies,’ what would it look like?
– Laurent Dubois & Achille Mbembe

Christopher Davis
Assistant Professor of French, Department of French and Italian, Northwestern University
A comparatist working in French, Latin, Italian and Occitan, Christopher Davis’s research centers on lyric poetry, medieval theories of poetry and language, medieval textual culture and the circulation of medieval Francophone literature in a Mediterranean context. His current book project, Poetry and Power: Literary Language in the High Middle Ages, examines the competition between French and Occitan as languages of vernacular literary authority during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Yasser Elhariry
Assistant Professor of French, Department of French and Italian, Dartmouth College
Professor Elhariry, who holds his PhD from NYU, is a specialist of nineteenth- and twentieth-century North African poetry in French and Arabic; his wider interests include translation and French global literature. He is working on a book to be titled Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation & Francophone Literary Culture; his second book project is on lyric, mysticism, Sufism, and Franco-Arabic poetry and poetics in the Mediterranean.

Chair: Cécile Bishop
Assistant Professor of French, NYU

Respondent: Camilo Frias
PhD student, Department of French, NYU

Futures of French is a new series highlighting the work of early career scholars. Future meetings will take place on January 30, 2017 and and March 23, 2017.

In English. Free and open to the public.