Welcome to the French Program at Montclair State! As Graduate Coordinator I’m happy to respond to all inquiries about the MA in French Studies, the MA in French Literature, or Instructional Certification in French. In fact, feel free to contact me about anything related to French! We have many exciting activities occurring through the year, from film nights, making crêpes, discussing career opportunities in French, and speaking French on the immersion floor of The Heights to dining in French restaurants and making cultural excursions to New York, Québec, and Nice.

Medieval and nineteenth-century French literature and cultural studies. The reception of medieval art, architecture, and literature in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe and America. Early photojournalism, celebrity interviews, European and American writer house museums, Naturalism, Decadence, mysticism, cabaret culture, nineteenth-century French theater. Global food politics and sustainability studies.

Joint Editor for the journal Romance Studies

MSU Institute for the Humanities

Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (Ashgate Publishing, 2012)

Why did writers' private homes become so linked to their work that contemporaries began preserving them as museums? Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum addresses this and other questions by providing an overview of the social forces that brought writers' homes to the forefront of the French imagination at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This study analyzes representations of the apartments and houses of Corneille, Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Sand, Zola, Loti, Montesquiou, Mallarme, and Proust, among others, arguing that the writer's home became a contested space and an important part of the French patrimony at this time. This is the first book to emphasize the house museum as an essentially modern construct, and to trace the history of ideas leading to its institutionalization in twentieth-century France. The interdisciplinary study also brings new attention to the importance of photojournalism for fin-de-siecle France and brings to light fascinating and forgotten examples of "at home" photography by Dornac and Henri Mairet, neither of whom are commonly included on lists of active nineteenth-century photographers. Elizabeth Emery provides a fresh and compelling perspective on conjunctions between visual and literary culture.

The Modernist as Philosopher. Selected Writings of Marcel Hebert.

Translated with C.J.T. Talar (Catholic University of America Press, 2011).

Makers of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of William C. Calin

The twenty well-known scholars featured in this Festschrift for William Calin engage in personal reflection about the ways scholars, writers, musicians, and artists from different periods have "made" the Middle Ages by exploring it in their own work. Contributors: Barbara K. Altman, Pam Clements, Elizabeth Emery, Karl Fugelso, Caroline Jewers, Alicia C. Montoya, Gwendolyn A. Morgan, E.L. Risden, Nils Holger Petersen, William D. Paden, F. Regina Psaki, Carol L. Robinson, Roy Rosenstein, Tom Shippey, Jesse G. Swan, M.J. Toswell, Richard Utz, Kathleen Verduin, Veronica Ortenberg West-Harling, Gayle Zachmann

Recent Articles

Project Links

• Staging La Fete des fous et de l'ane in 1898: A Commemoration of the Literary Middle Ages. Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture. Ed. Susan Harrow and Andrew Watts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 59-79.
• Misunderstood Symbolism: Rereading the Subjective Objects of Montesquiou's First Maison d'un artiste. Subjective Objects, ed. by Claire O'Mahoney. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2009. 18-43.
• Colonial Gothic: The Medievalism of America's "National" Cathedrals. The Other Medievalisms, ed. by Nadia Altschul and Kathleen Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 237-64.
• Dornac's "At Home" Photographs, Relics of French History. Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 36 (2008) [2009]: 209-24.
• The Martyred Cathedral: American Interpretations of Notre-Dame de Reims after the First World War. Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages, ed. by Alyce Jordan and Janet Marquardt. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009. 312-39.