Come join instructors from the

French Department for a virtual lunch conversation   (en français) via Zoom.

Les Tables françaises are a great place to practice your conversational French in an informal setting.

French-speakers at all levels from the Yale Community are welcome to join.

Please contact the hosts via email for Zoom information.

Virtual Tables begin the week of September 20^th

More Information

An interdisciplinary conference on the aesthetics and politics of Saharan spaces

The “Desert Futures : Sahara” symposium and workshop that was originally scheduled for April 2020 at Yale University in New Haven was postponed because of Covid-19.

It will be held at Yale from April 28 to May 1,  2022.  This interdisciplinary, multi-day event will bring together a distinguished group of artists and scholars from diverse disciplinary and linguistic backgrounds to participate in conversations focused on the poetics and politics of Saharan spaces in particular.

Details about the event will be made available on this website.

Conference Program

The year 2022 will mark the 400th anniversary of Molière, the star actor, famous author, and icon of French and Western culture. Organized by Christophe Schuwey (Yale), Sylvaine Guyot (NYU) and Benoît Bolduc (NYU), the Decentering Molière conference will bring new perspectives on the French Shakespeare. Instead of focusing only on Molière, what story can we tell if we adopt the perspective of his contemporaries—publishers, authors, actors, choreographers, composers, and visual artists, or journalists? What might we understand if we broaden our geographical and cultural scope—Molière in the Francophone, or in the Arab World? What can we discover if we study him through non-literary perspectives such as economics, religion, women’s rights, propaganda, historiography, theater business, or stage design? How do musicology, art history, history of the book, performance studies, or sociology challenge our understanding of Molière and his work? Decentering Molière will bring together new critical points of view and foster an interdisciplinary conversation between world-class specialists to challenge assumptions, deconstruct the myth and better understand a crucial figure and what he means for French and Western culture. The event will take place from April 14 to 16, the first two days at Yale and the last day in New York.

The event is made possible through the generous support of The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the Yale Department of French, the French Embassy Center of Excellence, the Yale Department of Frenchthe Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU and the NYU Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture.

The French Department will welcome Anne Lafont, art historian and directrice d’études à l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)  to deliver an online lecture (in French) as part ot the Enlightenment Lecture Series.

“Façonner la noirceur : Quelle esthétique de l’Afrique dans Les Lumières françaises ?”