Profile
Flora Champy joined the Department of French and Italian as an Assistant Professor of French in September 2018. She holds a dual PhD in French Literature from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Rutgers University. An alumna of the ENS de Paris, she received a master’s degree in Classics from Paris IV Sorbonne University. She previously taught at the ENS de Lyon and Johns Hopkins University.
Research
Flora Champy’s research focuses on eighteenth-century French political literature and philosophy. Her first book, L’Antiquité politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entre exemples et modèles (Classiques Garnier, 2022), explores, through the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the connection between mimesis and theoria, or how the representation of history and reality can buttress, challenge, and deepen the conceptualization of political issues. Based on an unprecedented analysis of his sources, it shows how Rousseau transformed the traditional Early modern idea of educational exemplarity, inherited from Antiquity, and weaved it into his political writing. It thus aims to renew the understanding of Rousseau’s often-misinterpreted interest in ancient political structures, examining such notions as popular sovereignty, the city as a body politic, and citizenship.
This work has led Flora Champy to develop additional interests in classical reception studies, education practices in Early modern Europe, theories and practices of reading, and the critical examination of critical theory.
She is also a regular and enthusiastic collaborator of L'Avant-Scène, the Department of French and Italian's French Theater Workshop.
Publications
Latest Publications
- L’Antiquité politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Images des langues, langues imaginées
- Imagining Ancient and Oriental Languages in Enlightenment France
Selected Publications
- Images des langues, langues imaginées. Imaginaires des langues anciennes et orientales en France au siècle des Lumières / Imagining Ancient and Oriental Languages in Enlightenment France, eds. Élise Pavy, Carole Boidin, Flora Champy. Paris: Hermann, Les collections de la République des Lettres”, “Symposiums” series, 2023, pp. 370
- Médiations et construction de l’Antiquité dans l’Europe moderne, Littératures classiques, 101, 2020, co-edited with Caroline Labrune.
- “Lire Montesquieu, théorie et critique” [“Reading Montesquieu: Criticism and Theory”], Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études françaises 74 (2022): 181-194.
- « Foucault, Rousseau et les Anciens : raisons d’une absence », in Foucault. Repenser les rapports entre les Grecs et les Modernes, dir. Jean-Marc Narbonne, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Heinrich Schlange-Schöningen, Vrin/PUL, 2020.
- “The Silent Expression of the General Will”, in Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau / Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau, eds Brigitte Weltman-Aron, Ourida Mostefai, Peter Westmoreland, Brill/Rodopi, 2020.
Selected Courses
- FRE 221: The Rise of France: French Literature, Culture, and Society from the origins to 1789
- FRE 351: The Age of Enlightenment
- FRE 352: “Women used to reign”: Women on stage in pre-Revolution France
- FRE 352: The Enlightenment “other”
- FRE 534: Rousseau’s Politics
- FRE 541: Formal and Conceptual Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
- FRE 571: Political Writing in Eighteenth-Century France
Miscellaneous
Médiations et construction de l’Antiquité dans l’Europe moderne
L’Antiquité politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entre exemples et modèles
