Cecile Alduy

Professor Alduy works primarily on French Renaissance Literature and contemporary French politics and culture, particularly political discourse analysis of the far right and presidential campaigns, as they relate to the question of French identity and mythologies of "Frenchness." She works in both field on the intersection between letters and politics in France. Areas of interests includes the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance, far right ideology and rhetoric (National Front), the intersection between cultural, literary and medical discourses on gender and the body, poetry and poetics, narrative forms and their discontent, French cinema and contemporary French literature.

Prof. Alduy is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, The Nation, the New Yorker's blog, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Boston Review, Le Monde, and the San Francisco Chronicle.She has a blog on contemporary culture, technology, and literature on Arcade.

Her latest book is "Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Paris: Seuil, 2015) and she has contributed a profile of Marine Le Pen for The Atlantic, as well as many investigative, analytical and opinion pieces on the National Front in Le Monde, Politico, The Nation, Al Jazeera America, L'Obs, etc.

She is co-editing with Dominic Thomas and Bruno Cornellier a special issue of the journal "Occasions" on “The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and their Aftermath” that gathers over a dozen essays from French, Canadian, American and English intellectuals from all horizons.

Her previous book is "The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the "Amours" in Renaissance France" (1549-1560) (Geneva: Droz, 2007). It examines how the poetics of French Petrarchan love collections was exploited by the generation of Ronsard and Du Bellay to promote a nationalist agenda, that of a "Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue" and its cultural supremacy.

She has published extensively on the works of Marot, Scève, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Louise Labé, La Boétie, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Philippe Jaccottet among others. Her publications also include a revised critical edition of Maurice Scève's Délie (Paris: STFM, 2001) and a comprehensive study of all works written by or on Scève from his lifetime to the present (Maurice Scève. Roma: Memini, 2006). She has served as guest editor of two collected volumes: a special issue of Réforme Humanisme Renaissance entitled "Licences et censures poétiques. La littérature érotique et pornographique vernaculaire à la Renaissance" (vol. 69, 2009); and the proceedings of the 2008 interdisciplinary conference Between Experience and Experiment In The Early Modern World, co-edited with Roland Greene and published in Republic of Letters (2010).

In other work, she expands the traditional field of Renaissance poetics by exploring new areas of inquiry: multi-authored collections as polemical proto-media (The Anatomical Blazons); the intersection between the emerging field of obstetrics, its book market, and the pre-history of obscenity and pornography ("Archeology of a Close-up"); the instability of gender in male and female lyrics ("The Anatomy of Gender"); or the economy of poetic production ("Self-Sustainable Economies," RQ. 2010).

Prof. Alduy was the Director of the Center of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) from 2010 to 2013.

She is Director of the French and Italian Department, starting in September 2015.