Warm congratulations go to three faculty members on their promotion to Full Professor as of Spring 2023! They are: in French & Francophone Studies, Hall Bjørnstad (also stepping into the role of FRIT Chair as of July 1, 2023) and Margaret Gray, and in French Linguistics, Kevin Rottet. Sincere congratulations are also in order for Colleen Ryan, who was named Associate Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs as of December 2022.

Guillaume Ansart published an article entitled “One injustice can never become a legitimate reason to commit another: Condorcet, women’s political rights, and social reform during the French Revolution (1789-1795)” in the Intellectual History Review (33.2, 2023).

Hall Bjørnstad has been kept busy by the 400th anniversary of the birth of French polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). In March, he co-organized a seminar stream with thirteen papers on Pascal under the heading “Pascal at 400: A Critical Prospective” at the yearly meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in Chicago, where FRIT graduate student Jason Wright presented the paper “Rediscovering Mysticism in Pascal” and Bjørnstad himself spoke about “Pascal and the Wound of Thinking.” Bjørnstad also presented the paper “La haie et la plaie: Lire les Pensées de Pascal aujourd’hui” at a large Pascal conference in Paris in June.

Kevin Rottet taught a new Gen Ed course in Fall 2022 on Cajun and Creole Louisiana. A highlight of the semester was a special performance of Zydeco music by Cedric Watson and his band Bijou Creole, who were in Bloomington for the Lotus Festival.

As part of a developing book project on French mass media and the Algerian War, Brett Bowles published an article titled “Fragmentary, Censored, Indispensable: the Audiovisual Archive of October 17, 1961” in the spring 2023 issue of French Historical Studies and conducted two weeks of additional research at archives in Paris and Aix-en-Provence during May 2023, supported in part by an International Mobility Grant from IU’s Office of the Vice-President for International Affairs.

Margot Gray greatly enjoyed teaching two new courses over the past academic year. Her seminar “20th and 21st-Century Lyric and Narrative Poetry” began with such iconic poets as Apollinaire and Valéry, and extended beyond the Hexagon to include lyrics by a First Nations Québécoise as well as by poets from Belgium, Martinique, and Switzerland. A second new course, taught in translation for the Hutton Honors College, traced issues in cultural codes involving race and gender through the fictions of four francophone women writers from Cameroon, France and Belgium.

Elizabeth Hebbard is one of just eight faculty members at all ranks across multiple IU campuses to receive a 2023-24 IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship. Hebbard’s research, which focuses on medieval manuscripts and music in French and Occitan, also earned her a Fall 2022 Fellowship from the College Arts & Humanities Institute. She traveled to Paris in the Fall to consult manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale and taught a new graduate seminar on the Troubadours (including women trobairitz) in Spring 2023. Hebbard also heads up a grant project that is cataloguing and digitizing little-known medieval manuscripts housed in the Midwest.

In October, Professor Julien organized a colloquium and art show, “Kalidou Sy: Return to the Native Land,” at the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. Visual artist and public intellectual Kalidou Sy had been the director of Senegal’s Schools of Fine Arts and Art Education (1986-96). Upon retiring in 1996, he moved to Bloomington, where he devoted himself fully to painting and artistic research until his death in 2005. After attending the Sy event, Oana Panaïté and Julien then joined other faculty leaders from African institutions for the week-long 3rd annual meeting of the Mellon Summer Institute on African Urbanities, hosted by Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

This year, the research group on Paulin S. Vieyra led by Vincent Bouchard has been working diligently to organize a research workshop for May 2024, which will bring scholars from around the globe to Bloomington to explore IU’s collections on early African Cinemas (1950s-1960s). During the workshop, participating researchers will benefit from the rich materials in the Sembène papers at the Lilly Library and in the Paulin S. Vieyra archives at the Black Film Center & Archive. This event will mark the opening of the Vieyra archives to the public, thanks to the BFCA’s recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to process these key documents which Bouchard has worked to make accessible to researchers since 2018. He and members of his research team, including Dana Vanderburgh (BA, French and Francophone studies, 2018) and Claire Fouchereaux (MA, French and Francophone studies, 2020), presented in the department’s Student Faculty Forum in September about the process and team effort in bringing Vieyra’s papers to IU.

Nicolas Valazza has been awarded a Research Fellowship from the College Arts and Humanities Institute and a Research Grant from the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs to pursue a collaboration on the research project UtPictura18 at the University of Aix-Marseille during the 2023-24 academic year.

Jeffrey Lamontagne is working with alumna Anne-José Villeneuve (PhD French Linguistics, 2011) and their graduate students on language variation in formal Canadian French, presenting their ongoing research at several conferences in the spring and preparing new work on French in Alberta. Furthermore, Lamontagne co-authored “Weight sensitivity and prominence in Laurentian French” in Glossa, showing how intonation in French follows systematic but previously untested patterns.