The French Center of Excellence hosted a series of programming designed to introduce Ohio State students to French cultural, literary, and linguistic experts in their fields. Autumn 2025 saw four speakers on campus:
Nicolas Valazza - Le Livre enflammé. Fictions et poétique de l'autodafé
Professor Valazza's third book, Le Livre enflammé. Fictions et poétique de l'autodafé (Hermann, 2024), examines the fictional theme of book burning in nineteenth-century French novels and poetry, at a time when several historical libraries were destroyed during the successive French revolutions. What is the significance of burning a book (or a library) within a book? Is it an act of self-reflection by the writer, concerned about the fate of their own work, or does it reveal a broader cultural anxiety about the fate of books, the transmission of knowledge, as well as freedom of expression and the press, or all of the above? These issues are more topical than ever, as books continue to be banned if not burned, and more and more academic and public libraries dematerialize their collections. Thus, the question of the transformation of books needs to be urgently addressed, not only from an economic and technological standpoint, but more decisively from the perspective of the humanities.
Nicolas Valazza is a Professor of French and Italian at Indiana University Bloomington. His primary research interests lie in the relationship between painting and literature, poetry and book history in 19th-century France.
Dr. André Leblanc - Modernity of Madame de Staël and the Coppet Group
What do Madame de Staël and the Coppet group have to say to us, more than two hundred years after the publication in 1800 of the essay On literature, the founding work of our vision of the relationship between literature and society? In particular, what is the fate of the notion of perfectibility that underpins the historical, social and aesthetic thinking of this think-tank? In Staël's view, perfectibility is the march of the human spirit, and should apply to all fields, whether moral, political or scientific. This initially enthusiastic idea of the perfectibility and continuous progress of the human spirit came up against the despotism of Napoleon's regime, but Staël's obstinacy and curiosity for other cultures led her to persist in her opinions, to the point where she can be seen as one of the founders of the notion of interculturality. Despite the vicissitudes of history, the thinking of Staël and the Coppet group has persisted to this day, but what does Staël have to say to us? Can we draw a parallel between the dawn of Romanticism in France and our own times, marked by the questioning of so many of the principles that forged the spirit of Staël and the Coppet group?
Dr. André Leblanc is a faculty member at Högskolan Dalarna in Sweden specializing in French. Dr. Leblanc is a visiting faculty member at Ohio State for the autumn 2025 semester thanks to a Swedish STINT Foundation grant.
Professor Bruno Cabanes - Book Launch Discussion: The Ghosts of Peleliu Island - Writing Narrative Non-Fiction as a Military Historian
Recently published by Editions du Seuil in Paris, Bruno Cabanes's monograph (Les fantômes de l'île de Peleliu. Récit ) [The Ghosts of Peleliu Island] examines the questions of memory and identity on Peleliu Island, in Micronesia. Retracing the war experience of Eugene B. Sledge, a young Marine who fought on the island in the fall of 1944, Cabanes undertook several research trips to Palau between 2017 and 2023. In his book, he engages in a temporal excavation, exploring the island’s jungle and intricate cave networks, and reflecting on the traces, vestiges and memories of a ten-week battle. The island’s history unfolds as a palimpsest, layered with voyages of exploration, ethnographic investigations, and successive waves of Spanish, German and Japanese colonizations. Combining travel impressions, American, Japanese and Palauan personal testimonies, archival materials, and field research, his book offers a vivid and poetic rendering of Peleliu and reveals the island in all its historical and emotional complexity.
Professor Annabel Kim - Free Fiction: Darrieussecq v. Laurens
In this talk, Professor Kim took up two biographical texts published at around the same time by each author— Darrieussecq’s Être ici est une splendeur (2016), Laurens’s La petite danseuse de quatorze ans(2017). On the face of it, these works would seem to be quite similar projects, bringing Darrieussecq and Laurens onto the same page, with each author delving into the history of art to excavate an individual life, but they are produced by authors who have starkly different views of what fiction is and should be able to do, and hence, different views of and for literature. Despite the documentary nature of both of these texts, I read them as an extension of the querelle between these two authors, as being interesting less for what they have to say about the individual lives they are writing, and more for what they have to say about fiction and its affordances.
Annabel L. Kim is Professor and Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (2018) and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (2022). Kim is also the editor of a special issue of Diacritics on the politics of citation, "Citation, Otherwise" and the co-editor, along with Morgane Cadieu, of "Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig," for Yale French Studies.
These events were sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series was also supported by the following Departments and Centers at Ohio State: Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Literatures, Near Eastern and South Asian Languages, Germanic Languages and Literatures, History, Design, and the Humanities Institute.
In December of 2020, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States selected the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University to join its prestigious network of Centers of Excellence. OSU’s Center of Excellence has the goal of promoting French and Francophone culture in the Midwest and beyond.
