Helen Solterer, Professor, French Studies

Helen Solterer
Office Location:  217B Languages Building
Office Phone:  (919) 660-3118, (919) 660-3138
Email Address: send me a message

Teaching (Fall 2012):

Office Hours:

Wednesday: 5-6 pm
or by appt.
Education:

PhDUniversity of Toronto1986
Boursière, Ambassade de France,Université de Paris VII1983
Masters of ArtUniversity of Toronto1981
Bachelor of ArtsGeorgetown University1978
Year of StudyUniversity College of Dublin1978
Specialties:

French
Early Modern
European Studies
Performance Studies
Gender Studies, Feminism, Women Studies, Queer Studies
Research Interests:

Pre-modern French Literature and Culture; Twentieth-Century European Cultural History; Performance Studies; Gender Studies. Research Interests include questions of fiction, memory, history; political discourse -- Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, François Villon; and contemporary experimental theater.

Current Ph.D. Students  

Representative Publications

  1. Medieval Roles in Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic (February, 2010), pp. 271 pages, 40 figures, The Pennsylvania State University Press
  2. H. Solterer, Theatre and Theatricality, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (2008), pp. 181-194, Cambridge University Press
  3. H. Solterer, Making Names, Breaking Lives: Women & Injurious Language, in Cultural Performances in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Nancy Freeman, edited by Eglal Doss-Quinby, Robert Krueger, E. Jane Burns (2007), pp. 207-21, Boydell & Brewer
  4. Helen Solterer, Gustave Cohen at Pont-Holyoke: The Drama of Belonging to France, edited by Christopher Benfey, Karen Remmler, Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II (2006), pp. 145-61, University of Massachusetts Press
  5. Fiction versus Defamation: The Quarrel over the Romance of the Rose, The Medieval History Journal, vol. 2 no. 1 (1999), pp. 111-141
  6. Performer le passé, in Paul Zumthor ou l’invention permanente. Critique, histoire, poésie, edited by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Christopher Lucken (1998), pp. 117-159, Droz
  7. co-authored with E. Jane Burns, Sarah Kay, and Roberta L. Krueger, Feminism and the Discipline of Old French Studies: "Une Bele Disjointure", in Medievalism in a Modernist Temper, edited by R. Howard Bloch, Stephen G. Nichols (1995), pp. 225-266, Johns Hopkins University Press
  8. The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (September, 1995), University of California Press (co-awarded The Modern Language Association Scaglione Prize, 1995.)
Conferences Organized

Helen Solterer studied in Washington, Paris, Dublin, and Toronto where she received her PhD. Her research and teaching focus on pre-modern vernacular literature and culture, and its interplay with twentieth-century and contemporary thought. Her last book, Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic [Penn State Press 2010] offers an experimental model in such *histoire croisée,* in the form of a pictorial essay exploring the politics and aesthetics of reviving the earliest theater for the generations of two World Wars. A French adaptation, “Un Moyen Âge républicain,” is forthcoming. Currently she is at work on two book projects: the first on the afterlives of pre-modern fiction; the second inquiring into the legacy of hate speech – blasphemy and sedition. Her first book which explored the question of defamation, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (California, 1995), won the MLA Scaglione Prize. A third area of her work involves performance – history and practice. It led to her co-organizing a workshop at the Théâtre Ouvert, Paris, “Théâtre et Résistance -- Dépersonnalisation et Identité: Odette Rosenstock & Moussa Abadi,” in June 2009. After hours, she pursues occasional writing; on teaching in the digital press, and on European culture.