Free from teaching obligations until their third year in the program, our graduate students devote two academic years to exploring new interests, refining their research practices, and getting to know the graduate faculty by enrolling in graduate seminars both within and beyond the Department.
Fall 2026 Graduate Seminars
FREN 6090: French for Reading
Nichole Gleisner / Wednesday 9:25-11:20am
Fundamental grammar structures and basic vocabulary are acquired through the reading of texts in various fields (primarily humanities and social sciences, and others as determined by student interest). Intended for students who either need a reading knowledge of French for research purposes or are preparing for French reading examinations and who have had no (or minimal) prior study of French. No preregistration required.
Conducted in English. Does not satisfy the language requirement.
FREN 8150: Medieval Lyric
Ardis Butterfield & Heather Webb / Tuesday 1:30pm-3:25pm
Medieval lyric is famously mobile, whether we consider the ways it was composed and performed, or the ways in which it was transcribed or recorded, or the paths it took around the Mediterranean. This course explores the trajectories of medieval lyrics from a variety of perspectives. We journey from Al-Andalus to Occitania, to Sicily, to Tuscany, to Umbria, to Paris, to Calais, and across the Channel to East Anglia and London. Authors include Arnaut Daniel, Thibaut de Navarre, Gace Brulé, Jean Renart, Adam de la Halle, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Jacopone da Todi, Giacomo da Lentini, Machaut, Deschamps, and many anonymous and understudied, but inventive English songs and short poems. Focusing on a selection of lyrics each week (with translations provided where appropriate), we range widely through such topics as the idea of voice, the relation between lyric and narrative, poetry and music, and song and translation, guided by the central issues of place, encounter, and (often gendered) power dynamics. Key questions include: Is there a theory of lyric in the Middle Ages? What can contemporary thinking and writing about lyric teach us about verse surviving from 600–800 years ago? What can medieval lyric contribute to contemporary debates about lyric? Our materials include lyrics that were recorded not only on parchment and paper but also on walls and in stained glass, on tombs, in tapestries, and on domestic objects, clothing, drinking cups, and rings. Through manuscripts, objects, words, images, and music we aim to uncover a sense of the inventive freedom at work in the lyric forms of the past. Conducted in English.
FREN 8420: Sexuality Studies in the French Renaissance
Dominique Brancher/ Thursday 9:25am-11:20am
In the words of the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, “sexuality is always something other than itself” (a biological phenomenon), and it is sexuality’s social and discursive constructions that we study in this seminar, through a large sample of texts from different genres. By crossing the approaches of gender studies, the history of emotions, and historical anthropology and literary analysis, we look at the abundant speech of sex that characterizes the Renaissance, where prohibition has had the value of incentive, as Michel Foucault has so clearly shown. Readings in erotic/pornographic poetry (Ronsard, Jodelle, Théophile de Viau), travel literature (Cholières), self-portraiture (Montaigne), chronicles and anecdotes (Brantôme, Pierre de l’Estoile), medical literature (Joubert, Paré, Duval), and short stories (Cent nouvelles nouvelles). Conducted in French.
FREN 8750: Psychoanalysis: Key Conceptual Differences between Freud and Lacan I
Moira Fradinger/Eng./ T 4pm-5:55pm
This is the first section of a year-long seminar (second section: CPLT 914) designed to introduce the discipline of psychoanalysis through primary sources, mainly from the Freudian and Lacanian corpuses but including late twentieth-century commentators and contemporary interdisciplinary conversations. We rigorously examine key psychoanalytic concepts that students have heard about but never had the chance to study. Students gain proficiency in what has been called “the language of psychoanalysis,” as well as tools for critical practice in disciplines such as literary criticism, political theory, film studies, gender studies, theory of ideology, psychology medical humanities, etc. We study concepts such as the unconscious, identification, the drive, repetition, the imaginary, fantasy, the symbolic, the real, and jouissance. A central goal of the seminar is to disambiguate Freud’s corpus from Lacan’s reinvention of it. We do not come to the “rescue” of Freud. We revisit essays that are relevant for contemporary conversations within the international psychoanalytic community. We include only a handful of materials from the Anglophone schools of psychoanalysis developed in England and the US. This section pays special attention to Freud’s “three” (the ego, superego, and id) in comparison to Lacan’s “three” (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). CPLT 914 devotes, depending on the interests expressed by the group, the last six weeks to special psychoanalytic topics such as sexuation, perversion, psychosis, anti-asylum movements, conversations between psychoanalysis and neurosciences and artificial intelligence, the current pharmacological model of mental health, and/or to specific uses of psychoanalysis in disciplines such as film theory, political philosophy, and the critique of ideology. Apart from Freud and Lacan, we will read work by Georges Canguilhem, Roman Jakobson, Victor Tausk, Émile Benveniste, Valentin Volosinov, Guy Le Gaufey, Jean Laplanche, Étienne Balibar, Roberto Esposito, Wilfred Bion, Félix Guattari, Markos Zafiropoulos, Franco Bifo Berardi, Barbara Cassin, Renata Salecl, Maurice Godelier, Alenka Zupančič, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Eric Kandel, and Lera Boroditsky among others. No previous knowledge of psychoanalysis is needed. Starting out from basic questions, we study how psychoanalysis, arguably, changed the way we think of human subjectivity. Graduate students from all departments and schools on campus are welcome. The final assignment is due by the end of the spring term and need not necessarily take the form of a twenty-page paper. Taught in English. Materials can be provided to cover the linguistic range of the group.
FREN 8800: Le Poème en Prose
Thomas Connolly/Fre./ M 9:25am-11:20am
This seminar looks at the development of the poème en prose from its beginnings as a response to the inadequacy of French verse forms, which were said to lend themselves poorly to the translation of ancient epic, to its emergence as an independent genre. What constitutes a prose poem and why do we need to distinguish it from prose, poetry, and even poetic prose? Readings include work by Fénelon, Parny, Baudelaire, Bertrand, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Nerval, Mallarmé, Jacob, Michaux, Ponge, and Char, as well as Hölderlin, Poe, and Rilke.
FREN 8990: Modernity
Maurice Samuels/Eng./W 1:30pm-3:25pm
The seminar studies literature and art from nineteenth-century France alongside theoretical and historical reflections to explore the significance of modernity. How did historical forces shape cultural trends? How did literature and art define what it means to be modern? Writers to be studied include Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola. Theorists include Benjamin, Durkheim, Foucault, Marx, Simmel, and Weber. We also examine the painting of Manet and his followers.
Reading knowledge of French required.
FREN 9003: Gender, Sexuality, and Modernity in Comparative Perspective
Carolyn Dean & Omnia El Shakry/ T 9:25am-11:20am
This graduate research seminar introduces us to the various lines of inquiry informing theories and histories of gender and sexuality. The course asks how historians and other scholars constitute gender and sexuality as objects of inquiry while addressing poststructuralist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory perspectives. The course aims to introduce students to the foundations of the field, beginning with sexology and psychoanalysis and its interpreters, and especially with Sigmund Freud’s and Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking work. Themes include psychoanalytic discourses and the construction of sexual subjects; colonialism, nationalism, and gender; bourgeois bodies and racial selves; sexualities; subalternity; religion, agency, and the feminist subject; and queering the modern. The emphasis is on a discursive understanding of gender and sexuality, while attending to diverse geographical regions.
FREN 9170: France by Rail: Trains in French Literature, Film, and History
Morgane Cadieu / W 4pm-5:55pm
The seminar examines trains in literature, cinema, and theory, from the end of the nineteenth century and the first locomotives to the subway in contemporary Paris. The readings and discussions will focus on: the representation of French historical events through trains (industrialization, colonization, deportation, decolonization, immigration); the railroad as an anthropological tool; the aesthetics of trains; and the tracks as metaphors for determinism and free will. We visit the Beinecke collections and the Yale University Art Gallery. Corpus can include Augé, Chéreau, Delbo, Djemaï, Dongala, Ernaux, Renoir, Sebbar, Sembène, Verne, Wajsbrot, and Zola. Conducted in English. Reading knowledge of French is not a requirement.
Spring 2027 Graduate Seminars
FREN 6700: Principles of Language Teaching and Learning – Section 02
Candace Skorupa/ T 1:30pm-3:25pm
Introduction to the basic principles of second-language acquisition theory, focusing on current perspectives from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Topics include language teaching methodology, communicative and task-based approaches, learner variables, intercultural competence, and models of assessment.
FREN 8120: The Old French Fable and Fabliaux
R. Howard Bloch/ T 9:25am-11:20am
A study of Marie de France’s 103 animal tales and some of the anonymous “Ysopets” as well as of the 170 comic verse tales whose veins of satire, parody, comedy of language, situation, character, and farce are at the root of the European comic tradition. We read the fables and the fabliaux against the background of twelfth- and thirteenth-century social, religious, and literary culture. Fables to be read in the bilingual (Old French and English) edition of Harriet Speigel and fabliaux in the recently published bilingual edition, with translations by Ned Dubin. Conducted in English.
FREN 9630: Radiant Matters/Nuclear Imperialism
Jill Jarvis/ M 1:30pm-3:25pm
Beginning in 1960, the French military detonated seventeen aerial and subterranean nuclear bombs in what is now the Algerian Sahara. After 1966, the French military detonated 193 more atomic and hydrogen bombs on the living inhabitants of the occupied Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean. Today, more than 70 percent of French energy supply is fueled by nuclear power that depends entirely on highly radioactive uranium extraction infrastructures located predominantly in African lands formerly colonized by France. The imperial radiance of France leaves an enduring toxic legacy whose impact is not yet known. Our planet is materially haunted on a cellular and atomic level by the slow violence of nuclear imperialism that nation-states train us not to perceive. With a particular but not exclusive focus on French nuclear imperialism and its archival silencings, this seminar considers how aesthetic works—novels, poems, photographs, film, public installation, collective archiving projects—help to render the obscured and pervasive violence of nuclear imperialism knowable and contestable.
Preequisite: Reading knowledge of French is strongly recommended, as several of the texts are not available in English translation.
FREN 9777: Fiction in the Archives
Alice Kaplan/ T 1:30-3:25
What can we learn about twentieth-century French literature from literary archives? The course investigates fiction by Céline, Genet, Camus, Sartre, Sarraute, Wittig, Memmi, and expatriate writers in Paris (Stein, Wright, and Wharton) by studying finished books in the light of manuscripts, letters, and historical sources. We explore in particular the idea of a “genesis” of a literary work. Classes take place in a classroom in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A primary goal of the course is to give students practical knowledge of working in literary archives at the Beinecke Library. There are many ways to integrate literary archives into research. The seminar empower students to experiment with archival work and to make the Beinecke collections a resource for future work, whether in a Ph.D. dissertation or a senior essay or term paper. Preference given to French graduate students; advanced undergraduates are welcome with permission. Discussion in English, advanced reading knowledge of French essential. We work to develop the ability to read handwritten manuscripts in French and English.
