“The Nonhuman Future”
Lucas Hollister (Dartmouth College)
Hollister is Associate Professor of French and Italian Languages and Literatures at Dartmouth College, with areas of expertise in 20th/21st-century French literature, the novel, popular culture, genre fiction and film, cultural and critical theory, and ecocriticism. He is the author of Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2019) and co-editor of “Frontiers of Ecocriticism,” a double issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (volume 25.1-2, January and March 2021). His articles have been published in MLN, PMLA, and French Cultural Studies. Hollister has written extensively on Antoine Volodine and was a speaker on the Volodine roundtable at the 2022 French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium. His current research focuses primarily on ecocriticism and genre fiction in France and the United States.
“The pull of the earth… Revisiting Michel Serres’ natural contract”
Stéphanie Posthumus (McGill University)
Posthumus is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University. Her work develops an ecocritical approach to the many diverse forms of the non-human in contemporary literature and philosophy. She is the author of French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically (U of Toronto P, 2017) and co-editor of the essay collections French Thinking about Animals (Michigan State UP, 2015) and French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century (Peter Lang, 2017). At the intersection of several contemporary critical streams, Posthumus’s research focuses on representations of the non-human, or more-than-human, in contemporary French literature as well as across European literatures and cultures. She is co-principal researcher for L’Imaginaire Botanique, a digital humanities project researching the circulation of plants in contemporary literature written in French (for more information, see https://imaginairebotanique.uqam.ca/). Her article, “Retours du végétal dans Herbes et golems (2012) de Manuela Draeger (Antoine Volodine) et Ruines-de-Rome (2002) de Pierre Senges” (L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 60.4, 2020) explores the question of the non-human in Volodine’s works.
“Animacy and Edibility: When Food Speaks Up”
Gina Stamm (University of Alabama)
Stamm is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on 20th– and 21st-century French and Caribbean literature, specifically questions of embodiment and the environment; environmental humanities; ecocriticism; and psychoanalysis. Her publications position her as an influential voice in ecocriticism, especially ecofeminism and plant studies. Publications include “Inventing a Vegetal Post-Exotic in the Work of Antoine Volodine” in Ecozon@:European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment (vol. 10.2, 2019), “Animal Végétal: Plants and Transhumanism in Contemporary French Literature” in French Forum (vol. 46.1, Spring 2021), and “Cannibal Plants: Tropiques and Martinican Aesthetics” in Women in French Studies (vol. 27, 2019). She is currently translating Volodine’s novel Songes de Mevlido, under consideration with University of Nebraska Press. She, too, was a speaker on the Volodine roundtable at the 2022 French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium.
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Department of French and Italian, the Center for Interdisciplinary French Studies, the Center for European Studies, the French House, and the Center for Interdisciplinary French Studies.