France-Florida Research Institute

Some of the most well-known intellectuals of 20th-century France have warned of the dangers of television to thought, to society and to the book. However, Marguerite Duras, a prominent writer and public intellectual, made use of the television as an extension of her literary project. As both an interviewer on state funded television shows during the postwar period, and later as a major cultural celebrity being interviewed herself, Duras foregrounds both her writerly persona and her public image in order…

Mame Fatou Niang is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on contemporary France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, Media, and Urban Planning. She is the author of Identités Françaises (Brill 2019) which examines the development of Afro-French identities and the works of second- and third-generation female immigrant writers of the banlieue. In 2015 she has co-directed Mariannes Noires: Mosaïques Afropéennes in which seven Afro-French women reflects on what it means to…

Dialogue around “Les Belles au bois dormant” with Dr. Charlotte Trinquet du Lys (University of Central Florida) and Dr. Rori Bloom (University of Florida) Dialogue in French with discussion in French and/or English Taking inspiration from Charles Perrault’s late seventeenth-century fairy tale, “La Belle au Bois dormant,” Drs. Trinquet and Bloom will explore several versions of the “Sleeping Beauty” story, including Italian sources and French variations on the theme. Their aim is to treat a familiar, classic text in order…

Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 book, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, recounts her two years of fieldwork research on African-derived religions and other cultural practices in the Caribbean.  Though it has received plenty of attention since being republished in 1990, Tell My Horse is still Hurston’s most complicated, least understood book. Her inscriptions of self are frequently debated in conflicting scholarly assessments and in this talk, Dr. Meehan tries to make sense of Tell My Horse…

Join us for a round table discussion in French of Montréal and Orléans over the decades. This event will be hosted at the Scott Nygren Studio located in Library West. It is free and open to the public. SPEAKERS Lotfi Abouda, Université d’Orléans Katja Ploog,Université d’Orléans Mireille Tremblay, Université de Montréal