Joseph P. Derosier, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures (French)
Mouat Junior Professor of International Studies
- Pronouns: he/him; il/lui
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Description / Biography
My teaching centers students, and aims to create spaces for students to explore francophone literature, film, and culture. My courses are designed as spaces for students to explore the stakes of literature in identity, nationalism, and history from the medieval period to the present. I have created classes ranging from “Joan of Arc: From Heretic to Trans Saint” to “Medieval Fanfictions: Telling Stories Across Borders.”
“Joan of Arc” looked at how Joan of Arc can act a site for exploring the intersections of history, narrative, fiction, fanfiction, propaganda, and poetics in her legacy. The goal of this course was to think about who makes history, and how, and in what contexts. From Joan’s contemporaries—the anonymous Bourgeois de Paris and the first French woman writer to make a living off of her writing, Christine de Pizan—to French historian Jules Michelet and mendicant nun Thérèse de Lisieux, and later to twentieth-century films, novels, and plays, what is Joan’s role in the making of identity, history, gender norms, and popular culture? How has Joan become a symbol for trans activists as well as xenophobic politicians? Can we ever fully understand who she was and why we continue to be enamored with and fascinated by her?
“Medieval Fanfictions” invited students to explore vernacular chronicle, romance, lays (short narratives), saints’ lives, and theoretical texts from the High Middle Ages, focusing on the role of texts written in French. Students analyzed the production of medieval identities in England through legendary tales and explored how human, animal, and allegorical figures were used to imagine worlds, frame nation, and imagine community. Students traced the transmission of narratives from French to English, focusing on how translation, adaptation, and revision operate in Francophone and Anglophone contexts, resulting in a range of final projects from analytical essays to creative writing projects.
My research focus is on the Francophone literary world at the turn of the 13th century, when French was used as a literary, mercantile, and colonial language from England to the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant. My current project insists upon romance being a political genre in late-twelfth and early-to-mid-thirteenth-century romances. This draws from queer theory and biopolitics, or the ways in which politics and government control, deploy, racialize, and understand bodies to analyze the very root of sovereignty and the fictions of the sovereign’s relation to governance in medieval literature and culture. I argue that medieval literature helps us understand that longer history of sovereignty’s relation to populations, bodies, and fictions of nation and nationhood, dismantling our current notions of biopolitical trajectories and francophone literary history. This trajectory of the Grail quest, as it is renewed with each new version of the Grail quest, allows us to trace how copies, adaptations, and continuations are acts of reading as much as they are acts of writing and composition. This project upsets trajectories of Grail romance as it has been understood, and rewrites the history of romance as a politically-engaged genre. This intervention aims to reposition romance as a genre that re-imagines political pasts and proposes alternate futures.
Interested in studying French? Please email me!
See “Disrupting the binary in medieval lit,” written by a student, about a recent class taught in translation.
See this article about my teaching: “Rewriting medieval French literature.”
And see what sort of collaborative work is going on with the Wright Museum: “Recent Acquisitions from the West African Calligraphy Institute, Dakar, Senegal.”