The French Center of Excellence and Department of French & Italian are pleased to announce the speakers for the Spring 2025 lecture series. The first of our speakers is Professor Morgane Cadieu. Cadieu is an Associate Professor of French at Yale University. Professor Cadieu’s talk is entitled Annie Ernaux and the Poetics of Social Mobility.
Morgane Cadieu will discuss her book On Both Sides of the Tracks (Chicago, 2024), which demonstrates that socially mobile writers and characters are the digest of our literary and political moment. Focusing on works by Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis and Marie NDiaye, among others, her research aims to offer a new perspective on class mobility as a literary question. It is through forms that the book addresses pressing social issues: Is upward mobility a matter of birth or becoming? How long does one remain mobile? Do social climbers emancipate others in return?
The lecture will peruse the literary settings that have replaced the idiom of the “social ladder” today, especially doors and trains. Cadieu will also share her most recent research on the ecology of social mobility and on the prism of the alphabet in Ernaux’s works.
Professor Cadieu’s talk will take place on Thursday, January 30 from 4:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m. in Thompson Library 165. Light refreshments will be served after the talk.
Registration details coming soon.
If you are interested in purchasing other works of Professor Cadieu, please use the button below.
This event is sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series is also supported by the following departments and centers at Ohio State: African American & African Studies, Department of History, Department of History of Art, Spanish & Portuguese, Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, Department of Slavic & Eastern European Languages & Literatures, the Humanities Institute and the Center for Languages, LiteraturesCultures.
In December of 2020, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States selected the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University to join its prestigious network of Centers of Excellence. OSU’s Center of Excellence has the goal of promoting French and Francophone culture in the Midwest and beyond.
