Eloise Briere
As its name implies, the new Ph.D. in French at the University at Albany differs substantially from most traditional Ph.D. programs which are geared towards literary criticism and the literary history of continental France. In this new configuration, French Studies are plotted along two axes. The first is disciplinary, or rather interdisciplinary, blending the wide range of faculty expertise in literature, art criticism, film study, history, theology, linguistics and technological innovation. The other is geographical, embracing what has come to be called the "Francophone world," which ranges from French-speaking Europe to North America, the Caribbean and Africa. This axis brings into play a number of areas of study such as imperialism, immigration and assimilation, post-coloniality, paradigmatic shifts from oral to written culture and the creation of "national" literatures and cultures.
While not explicit within the two axes described above, research on women is central to the new Ph.D. in French Studies. Faculty publications and interests and new courses clearly indicate the Department's strengths in this area.
Novels and Films
George Santoni is scheduled to teach Images de femmes en France, which will be devoted to contemporary films and novels by women, while Eloise Briere is developing a course on Francophone Women Writers that will focus on the impact of class/development, neo-colonialism and race on women's writing. Her forthcoming book on Cameroonian literature (Le Roman camerounais et ses discours), devotes considerable space to women's literary voices within the context of a developing African national literature.
In addition to Robert Greene's four articles on the status of women in French literature (ranging from Flaubert's Madame Bovary to the work of Marguerite Duras) his forthcoming book focuses, among other things, on the misogynist current within the moraliste tradition in French literature (Just Words: Moralism and Metalanguage in Twentieth Century French Fiction).
Voices and Images of Women
In both her research and teaching Mary Beth Winn includes women of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as writers, patrons and sources of debate. Several of her published articles reflect such concerns as well as her interest in the female "voice" she discovered in anonymous poems of the late Middle Ages-early Renaissance when she did her work on the French chanson.
Ray Ortali's interests focus on the literary debate of the early Renaissance "La Querelle des Femmes" and on the representation of women in Rabelais. Jean-Francois Briere's research on l'Abbe Gregoire, the late eighteenth-century French abolitionist, has led him to the discovery of Gregoire's "feminist" writings which he plans to study and edit. Professor Briere is particularly interested in issues related to the history of French feminism and to the status of women in contemporary France, both of which are included in a forthcoming book (Les Francais).
As demonstrated by the above range of interests, women's studies are clearly at home in the University at Albany's new Ph.D. program in French Studies. All of the above faculty are interested in fostering graduate research in their fields of interest and would agree with their colleague Robert Greene who observed, "The doctoral dissertations (on women) are there, waiting to be written."