Helen Solterer, Professor of French and Romance Studies
| Office Location: | 217B Languages Building |
| Office Phone: | (919) 660-3118, (919) 660-3100 |
| Email Address: |   |
Teaching (Spring 2012):
- FRENCH 126.01, FREE SPEECH: FRANCE-USA
Synopsis
- Languages 305, TuTh 11:40 AM-12:55 PM
- ROMST 150.01, IMAGINING EUROPE:CULT/LANG/POL
Synopsis
- Old Chem 025, TuTh 02:50 PM-04:05 PM
- Education:
PhD University of Toronto 1986 Boursière, Ambassade de France, Université de Paris VII 1983 Masters of Art University of Toronto 1981 Bachelor of Arts Georgetown University 1978 Year of Study University College of Dublin 1978
- Specialties:
-
French
Early Modern
European Studies
Performance Studies
Gender Studies, Feminism, Women Studies, Queer Studies
- Research Interests:
Pre-modern French Literature and Culture; Theater; Gender Criticism; Modern French Cultural History
- Current Ph.D. Students
- Julie Singer
- Brooke Heidenreich Findley
- Daniel De Cillis
- Representative Publications
(More Publications)
- 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
- H. Solterer, Theatre and Theatricality, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (2008), pp. 181-194, Cambridge University Press
- 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
- 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
- Fiction versus Defamation: The Quarrel over the Romance of the Rose, The Medieval History Journal, vol. 2 no. 1 (1999), pp. 111-141
- 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
- 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
- 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.)
Helen Solterer received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 1986. Her research and teaching focus on medieval & early modern vernacular writing, modern cultural history, and contemporary theater. She has published The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (California, 1995), which won the MLA Scaglione Prize. Her current book, Playing for Life: Medieval Roles for Modern Times, explores the aesthetic, political and personal effects of the Middle Ages for the twentieth century. It has led to the essays "Gustave Cohen at Pont-Holyoke: The Drama of Belonging to France" (2005), "Performer le passé" in Paul Zumthor ou l’invention permanente. Critique, histoire, poésie (1998), and "European Medieval Studies Under Fire, 1919-45," a special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies that she edited in 1997. She continues to write on free speech and verbal injury; essays include "The Freedoms of Fiction for Gender in Premodern France" (2002), and "Fiction vs. Defamation: The Quarrel over the Romance of the Rose" Medieval History Journal (1999).