Position
Professor
Role
Placement Officer
Office Phone
Email
Office
362 East Pyne
Office Hours
Tuesday: 1:00 pm-4:00 pm
Website
Bio/Description
Profile
Christy Wampole joined the department as Assistant Professor of French in 2011. She received her Ph.D in both French and Italian from Stanford University in 2011. She has published various articles, translations, and book reviews in MLN, The Modern Language Review, The New York Times, The New Yorker, L’Esprit créateur, Small Axe, The French Review, Magazine littéraire, Quaderni del ‘900, and Yale French Studies.
Research Interests
Her specific areas of focus are nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century French, Francophone, and Italian literature, especially the novel and the essay, with a special interest in feminism, ecology, and media. The intersection of philosophy and literature is central to her work as a researcher and teacher. She has written on topics including botany and the metaphor of rootedness, masculinity, drones, photography, the Minitel and Internet, irony, realism, essays and essay-film, journalism, and gender issues in France and the United States.
Courses
- FRE 207 Studies in French Language and Style
- FRE 222 French Literature, Culture, and Society since 1789
- FRE 224 French Literature: Approaches to the Language of Literary Texts
- FRE 225 Twentieth-Century French Popular Music
- FRE 307 Advanced French Language and Style
- FRE 313 Contemporary French Civilization
- FRE 315 Contemporary French Prose (1990-present)
- FRE 334/ECS 344/HUM334 Race in France
- FRE 367 Feminist Thought in Twentieth-Century French Literature and Art
- FRE 385/CWR 385 The Art of the Essay
- FRE 405/AMS 405/GSS 402 French and American Comparative Feminism
- FRE 406/GER 406 Roots in 20th-Century France and Germany
- FRE 414/HUM 414/ECS 415/EPS 416 Fear and France
- FRE 524/HUM 524 Realism and (Post-)Truth
- FRE 530 Essayism: Trajectory of a Genre
- FRE 540/ITA 540/COM 540 Italo Calvino in France
- FRE 542 Racial Imaginaries
- FRE 545/HUM 545 Zeitgeist Literature
Publications
Books
- The Cambridge History of the American Essay (Cambridge University Press 2024)
- Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in 21st-Century France (Columbia University Press 2020)
- Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (University of Chicago Press 2016)
- The Other Serious: Essays for the New American Generation (HarperCollins 2015)
Essays and Reviews
- “How To People a Landscape” The European Review of Books, April 2023
- “Skinned Alive” The European Review of Books, December 2022
- “Can Culture Degenerate?” Aeon Magazine, August 2021
- “Simone Weil for Americans” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2021
- “Dirty Essays, Clean Essays” Public Books, January 2021
- “The Perils of Abstraction” New York Times, November 2019
- “Strange and Intelligent: On Simone Weil” Aeon Magazine, October 2018
- “What Is the Future of Speculative Journalism?” The New York Times, January 2018
- “How to Live without Irony (for Real, this Time)” The New York Times, December 2016
- “My Syllabus, My Self” New York Times, October 2016
- “Barthes’ Silken Legacy” The New Yorker, October 2015
- “The Conference Manifesto” New York Times, May 2015
- “In Praise of Disregard” New York Times, February 2014
- “The Essayification of Everything” New York Times, May 2013
- “How To Live without Irony” New York Times, November 2012
Select Academic Articles
- “What Is Zeitgeist Literature?,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (forthcoming)
- “Introduction: What Should We Be Doing in French and Francophone Studies?,” Romanic Review (forthcoming)
- “Social Justice and the American Essay” in The Cambridge History of the American Essay, edited by Jason Childs and Christy Wampole, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)
- “An Ecocritical Metaphorology,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Vol. 25, no. 1, p. 52-59, 2021
- “Dalì’s Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice” in On Essays, edited by Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy, Oxford University Press, 2020
- “What Is It Like to Be a Drone?: On Jean-Noël Orengo’s L’Opium du ciel,” Modern Language Review, Vol. 115, no. 3, p. 536-553, July 2020
- “Conceptual Botany: Michel Houellebecq and a Burgeoning Vegetal Interest,” French Forum, Vol. 44, no. 2, p. 207-223, Fall 2019
- “Poujade’s Infowars: On Barthes’ Anti-Anti-Intellectualism,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, vol. 62, p. 73-103, August 2019
- “Thinking Too Much: Calvino’s Palomar,” Compar(a)ison, vol. 33, 2015
- “’Cyberia, Syberia…’: Clones, Virtual Spaces, and Cyber-Selves in Claudio Magris’s Alla cieca,” MLN, vol. 129, no. 1, January 2014
- “Michel Tournier and the Virtual Essay,” Modern Language Review, vol. 109, no. 1, January 2014
- “Essayism and the Multiplication of Possibility in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des derniers gestes.” Small Axe, vol. 17, no. 3, November 2013
- “The Impudence of Claude Cahun.” L’Esprit créateur, vol. 53, no. 1, Spring 2013
- “Schreber, parfaitement extralucide.” Magazine littéraire no. 524, October 2012
- “Cioran’s Providential Bicycle.” Revista Transilvania (Romania), January 2012
- “Fenoglio’s Vitalist Impulse: Primaverilità, Infuturamento, and the Force of Life in Il Partigiano Johnny,” Quaderni del ‘900, no. 11, November 2011