Faculty

Unless otherwise noted, the members of the Faculty listed below will be offering courses in French in 2009-2010. Their specialties and areas of major interest are indicated and you can see what courses they are teaching by going to the Courses folder. Please note that not all offices are located in Rochambeau House.

EDWARD J. AHEARN EDWARD J. AHEARN, Professor, University Professor. Ph.D. Yale University. Comparative Literature; 19th and 20th century French literature and poetry; literary theory; literature and the city. His publications include: Rimbaud, Visions and Habitations, 1983; Marx and Modern Fiction, 1989; Visionary Fictions, 1996; Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001, forthcoming 2010. Comparative Literature Department, Marston Hall; phone (401) 863-3029. >>More information
RÉDA BENSMAIA, Chair of French Studies, Professor, University Professor. Doctorat de Troisième Cycle, École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.  20th-century literature and literary theory; postcolonial Francophone studies; literature and film. Author of The Barthes Effect (1987); The Year of Passages (1995); Alger ou la maladie de la mémoire (1997); Experimental Nations or The Invention of the Maghreb (2003). Editor of Gilles Deleuze (Lendemains, Berlin, 1989) and Recommending Deleuze (Discourse, 1998); Deleuze et le cinéma (Cinémas, Journal of Film Studies, 2007). Rochambeau House room 104; phone: (401) 863-3517. >>More information
MICHEL-ANDRÉ BOSSY MICHEL-ANDRÉ BOSSY,Professor.  Ph.D. Yale University. Comparative literature.  Medieval French, Anglo-Norman, and Occitan poetry and prose. 12th- to 15th-century literary patronage and court politics. Cultural connections between France and its neighbors, especially during the age of the troubadours and the Hundred Years' War. Rochambeau House room 204; phone: (401) 863-3595 >> More Information
SANDA GOLOPENTIA SANDA GOLOPENTIA, Professor, Ph.D. University of Bucharest. 20th century literature/culture; Francophone Studies (Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, U.S.); 17th-20th century theater; critical theory; semiotics; philosophy of language. Author of, among other books: Les Voies de la pragmatique, 1988; co-author (with M. Martinez Thomas) of Voir les didascalies, 1994. Currently working on a book entitled Histoires de dires. Rochambeau House, room 208; phone (401) 863-2740, sabbatical Spring 2009. >> More information
YOUENN KERVENNIC, Lecturer, Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Culture and Civilization of France; otherness and travel. Author of a novel L´appel de la mer, 2000. Currently working on a travelogue: Le Routard en Smoking Blanc. Rochambeau House Room 304A; phone (401) 863-2850. >>More information
VIRGINIA KRAUSE VIRGINIA KRAUSE, Associate Professor, Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Renaissance literature, particularly early modern romance and the history of leisure. Author of Idle Pursuits: Literature and oisiveté in the French Renaissance (2003). Her current projects include an edition (with Christian Martin) of Jean Bodin's De la démonomanie des sorciers and a study of confessional practices and Witchcraft titled Witches' Confessions: The Making of Witchcraft Theory in Early Modern France. Graduate Advisor and Director of Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (REMS). Rochambeau House, room 201; phone (401) 863-3070. >>More information
STÉPHANIE RAVILLON, Visiting Lecturer, Ph.D Université de Bourgogne. Postcolonial literature; 20th century French culture; translation. Rochambeau House, room 304 B, phone (401) 863-2494.
THANGAM RAVINDRANATHAN THANGAM RAVINDRANATHAN, Assistant Professor, Robert and Nancy Carney Assistant Professor of French Studies.  Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania and Université de Paris - VIII. 20th literature and criticism/theory; poetry; narratives of travel; the contemporary novel. Currently working on a book titled Là où je ne suis pas: géographie et mélancolie à l’ère moderne. Rochambeau House, room 319; phone (401) 863-6495.
Sabbatical Spring 2010.
ANDREW ROSS ANDREW ROSS, Adjunct Lecturer and Director of the Language Resource Center (LRC), Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley. Language technology and pedagogy, medieval literature and culture; religious narrative and allegory; late medieval poetics. CIT 203; phone (401) 863-7010. >>More information
PIERRE SAINT-AMAND PIERRE SAINT-AMAND, Professor, Francis Wayland Professor.  Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University. 18th-century novel; philosophy of the enlightenment; the French revolution; gender and culture; literary criticism and theory. His publications include: Diderot : Le labyrinthe de la relation (Vrin, 1984), Les Lois de l´hostilité (Seuil, 1992); The Libertine´s Progress (New England, 1994). He is the editor of Diderot (Stanford French Review, 1984), Le Roman au XVIIIe siècle: Postérités (Stanford French Review, 1987); Autonomy and the Enlightenment (Stanford French Review, 1993) and of Thérèse philosophe, Confession d´une jeune fille (Gallimard, "Pléiade", 2000, 2005). He has completed a new book, Idle Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Laziness in Eighteenth-Century France. Rochambeau House, room 205; phone (401) 863-3035. >>More information
GRETCHEN SCHULTZ, Associate Professor. Ph.D. Cornell University. 19th-century poetry and fiction; gender and sexuality studies. Author of The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in 19th-Century French Poetry (1999), editor of An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry from France: In English Translation with French Text (2008). Director of Undergraduate Studies and Honors Program. Rochambeau House, room 229; phone (401) 863-3753. >>More information
LEWIS SEIFERT LEWIS SEIFERT, Professor. Ph.D. University of Michigan. 17th-century literature; gender and sexuality studies; cultural studies; comparative approaches to folklore and the literary fairy tale. Author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias (Cambridge, 1996) and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Michigan, 2009); and co-editor with Todd Reeser of Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities in Culture and Theory (Delaware, 2008). His current projects include an anthology of fairy tales by seventeenth-century women writers and a book-length study, Classical Modernities: Confronting Past and Present in Seventeenth-Century France. Rochambeau House, room 230; phone (401) 863-1029. . >> More information
SHOGGY T. WARYN SHOGGY T. WARYN, Senior Lecturer. Ph.D. University of Iowa. French language and French film; media history and technology; cross-cultural studies; on-line pedagogy and teaching. Co-author of the CULTURA project at MIT with Prof. Furstenberg and Prof. Levet.
Resident Director of Brown-In-France in Paris, 2009-2010 >>More information
ANNIE J. WIART ANNIE J. WIART, Senior Lecturer, MA, Brown University. Theory and practice of foreign language teaching and learning; French language and culture; teacher training. Rochambeau House, room 306; phone 401-863-3222. >> More information

Emeriti/Emeritae

INGE WIMMERS, Research Professor of French Studies, Ph.D. Columbia University. 17th, 19th and 20th century literature; literary theory and analysis; poetics of the novel; reader-oriented approaches to literature. Her books include: Poetics of Reading: Approaches to the Novel , Proust and Emotion:  The Importance of Affect in "A la recherche du temps perdu, " and Approaches to Teaching Proust's Fiction and Criticism.
>> More information