Senior Fellowships at IRH afford tenured faculty at UW–Madison the rare opportunity to take four semesters away from teaching. Still, it can be easy for fellows to overestimate how much progress they can make on their research. Anne C. Vila (open-topic Senior Fellow, 2021–2025) is the exception. During her four years at IRH, Anne not only completed two-thirds of her book project, Convulsive Enlightenment: Lives and Afterlives of the Convulsionnaires in French Culture and Theory (18th to 21st Centuries), but also several articles and conference papers tied to this project.
A scholar of 18th-century French literature and culture, Anne’s current research centers on the Convulsionaries, a fringe group of the dissident reform movement within Catholicism known as Jansenism. The epicenter of the convulsionary movement was the tomb of deacon François de Pâris, who, in 1727, died a martyr to the cause of protesting the repressive papal bull Unigenitus and soon became the focus of a strange faith-healing movement that escalated to include convulsions, complex figurations of the persecution of Jansenists, apocalyptic prophecies, and brutal bodily mortifications. Between the late 1730s up until the French Revolution, some convulsionary groups even carried out prolonged crucifixions.
It’s not difficult to see why one might become interested in this movement. In Anne’s case, it was a combination of serendipity—namely, a series of interrelated archival discoveries back in 2014 and 2015—and connection to her earlier research that drove her to study the Convulsionaries. As she explains, “like my previous scholarship, Convulsive Enlightenment makes visible parts of the 18th century that have been obscured by the period’s secular-rationalist view: its preoccupation with feeling and matters of the body, its melancholic aspects, and its subversive, sometimes anti-modernist undercurrents. This study complicates the myth of the rational 18th century by examining the persistent challenge posed to the so-called cult of reason in France by a cult of a very different order. It also aims to bring an underexplored part of France’s history into dialogue with contemporary debates on topics like fanaticism, the aesthetic fascination of violence, and the medicalization of certain individuals, mental states, or social phenomena.”
As is the case with many academics, Anne did not always plan on being a professor of French. In fact, Anne stumbled upon this career much like how she began to write about the convulsionary movement: through luck. “As an undergraduate at Brown University in the calmer era of the 1980s, I had the freedom to believe that many paths were open to me,” Anne recalled. “I was a premed majoring in comparative literature, and by my senior year I realized that I was more interested in the historical side of the sciences that I was studying than in science proper. When, in my first year of graduate school, I discovered the writings of Diderot and the Encyclopédie, I was hooked on the eighteenth century, in an intellectual sense: delving into those works launched my career-long effort to investigate literature and biomedical thought in tandem. Reading, teaching, and researching literature and culture are, for me, very much about exploring how the mind works—and how it is embedded in the flesh-and-blood side of human existence.”
This past spring, Anne’s fellowship culminated in a Burdick-Vary Symposium. Reflecting on their common interest in the significant role translation has played in the reception, dissemination, and creative life of writers whom they study, Anne and her colleagues Ernesto Livorni and Florence Vatan put together an event on the theme “The Work of the Literary Translator: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics.” The event was, by all measures, a success. It attracted attendees not just from the Department of French & Italian, but also from English; German; Classical and Near Eastern Studies; the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program; UW–Madison libraries; alums; and the general public. Anne gives special thanks to Katie Apsey (IRH Associate Director) and Jojo Lovejoy (IRH Project Assistant) for their help with many details (including the beautiful poster and program), and to Associate Dean Grant Nelsestuen for giving the opening remarks at the symposium and attending the symposium’s first panel. That panel started with a talk by the internationally renowned scholar/poet/translator Martin Rueff (University of Geneva), who also served as Halls Visiting Scholar in FRIT this spring.
The symposium lasted for the entirety of a Friday in late February. It was a day filled with talks like “‘Blackness’ in French: Race Matters in Translation,” “Salvatore Quasimodo’s Hermetic Translation of The Odyssey,” and “Carlo Goldoni Meets the Wisconsin Idea: The 1912 Translation of La locandiera.” Despite the many lenses through which translation can be (and was) explored at the symposium, Anne noticed that a key thread emerged: the value of the affective, emotional aspect of translation done by humans on important works created by other humans. “The papers we heard spoke eloquently about the love and struggle involved in translation, about the painstaking search for the right words to convey the meaning and beauty of the original text, and about translation as an intense form of attention: that is, of bringing to light key things within the original text, and making that text meaningful for a new generation of readers,” Anne said.
Having planned a Burdick-Vary Symposium from start to finish, Anne has two pieces of advice for those Senior Fellows planning symposia of their own. First, she encourages others to make use of Memorial Library room 126 (a free conference space) and to loop in UW–Madison’s subject librarians. Here, Anne is especially thankful to have had the help of Laura Martin (Ibero-American Studies and Romance Languages Libraries), who mounted a library exhibit tied to the symposium. Second, she recommends adhering to the “Steve Nadler” rule for fielding questions during Q & A (i.e. one question per audience member, with no follow-up questions).
Given that her work straddles literary studies and intellectual history, Anne is no stranger to collaborating with scholars of varying disciplinary backgrounds, so she felt right at home in IRH’s multi-disciplinary scholarly community. In the end, it is certain methodological insights from Monday seminars and their associated conversations—how to deal with material discovered in true, physical archives; how to find meaningful patterns in a large and diverse corpus; and what gets into the “afterlife” of a particular event or idea—that Anne will take with her as she departs the Institute.
IRH welcomes Anne back any time to attend a Monday seminar and ask her characteristically astute questions!