The Department of French & Italian and French Center of Excellence regularly co-sponsor and produce lectures relating to a number of cultural, social, and linguistic phenomena. This Autumn's schedule is going to be an especially good one. All Center of Excellence lectures are free and open to the public. Please see below for a list of our current lecture dates and topics.
Remember to register for each event using the links provided.
Stay connected with the Center of Excellence & French Press through their website.
The Center of Excellence hosted Kévi Donat on September 19 from 5:30pm-6:30pm for a lecture in Hagerty Hall 180.
Kévi Donat is a Martinique-born independent scholar and podcaster (Le Tchip, Paris Noir). He created guided tours focusing on the Black history of Paris, following the steps of icons such as James Baldwin, Paulette Nardal, Frantz Fanon, Josephine Baker or Aimé Césaire.
Please feel free to review the recorded lecture here.
The Center of Excellence will host Professor Jennifer Tamas on October 5 from 5:30pm-6:30pm for a lecture in Hagerty Hall 180. This event is open to the public. All are welcome and encouraged to attend.
"Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?": Retracing the Art of Consent in Beauty and the Beast
In this presentation, Jennifer Tamas (Rutgers University) will show how the "male gaze" prevailed in establishing the French classics and their reception. By selecting authors deemed essential to our literary heritage and by erasing the works of women writers, the patriarchal gaze undervalued female agency in well-known works of fiction such as Andromaque, La Princesse de Clèves, or Little Red Riding Hood.
Professor Tamas's study also unveils women's resistance at a time when galanterie was at once a means of seduction and an ideal shaped by both men and women. Surprisingly, heroines of the Grand Siècle can empower us with accounts of their struggle and help us reclaim an undervalued literary matrimoine.
Jennifer Tamas is Associate Professor of French at Rutgers University. She is the author of Le Silence trahi. Racine ou la déclaration tragique, (Genève, Droz, 2018) and Au NON des femmes. Libérer nos classiques du regard masculin (Paris, Seuil, 2023)
More information here.
Register here.
There is a Zoom webinar option for those who are unable to attend in person. Please register here.
If you require accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Matt Lang at lang.650@osu.edu. Requests made by September 21, 2023 will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the University will make every effort to meet requests made after that.
The French Center of Excellence will host Mohamed MBougar Sarr for a lecture entitled, The influence of anxiety: From Bound to violence to The most secret memory of men. This lecture is sponsored by the French Center of Excellence, Villa Albertine, Other Press publishing house. It will be held on October 31, 2023 from 5:30pm-6:30pm in Hagerty Hall 180. The event is open to the public. All are welcome and encouraged to attend.
Author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt, will speak on his work. Born in Senegal and writing in French, Sarr has received worldwide accolades for his novels, notably La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (lit. 'The Most Secret Memory of Men') and Terre Ceinte (2015), published as Brotherhood in English translation (2021).
Please register for the event here.
There is a Zoom webinar option available for those who are unable to attend in person. Register here.
If you require accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Matt Lang at lang.650@osu.edu. Requests made by October 17, 2023 will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the University will make every effort to meet requests made after that.
Please reach out to Matt Lang at lang.650@osu.edu for more information. Stay connected with the Center of Excellence & French Press through their website.
The Department of French & Italian, French Center of Excellence, and OSU Newark are co-sponsoring this year's Jules Verne Residency author conversation. This year's resident, François-Henri Désérable, will host a conversation on Monday, November 7, 2023 in the Thompson Library Multipurpose Room (165) from 4:00pm-5:00pm. This conversation will be held in French.
Dans L’Usure d’un monde (Gallimard, 2023), François-Henri Désérable raconte sa traversée de l’Iran en 2022, sur les traces de Nicolas Bouvier et au plus fort des manifestations qui secouent le pays après le décès de Mahsa Amini. Au terme de quarante jours passés dans une République islamique aux abois, il revient avec un récit qui retrace son voyage depuis Téhéran jusqu’aux confins du Balouchistan et témoigne de sa rencontre avec un peuple iranien dont il décrit la résilience face à la répression. Auteur de cinq ouvrages publiés aux Éditions Gallimard, dont Mon maître et mon vainqueur, Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, François-Henri Désérable est l’invité de la résidence d’écriture Jules Verne à l’Université Ohio State et sera en conversation le mardi 7 novembre avec deux professeurs du Département de Français et d’Italien, Dr. Benjamin Hoffmann et Dr. Jennifer Willging.
More information here.
