An international conference focused on the future of revolutionary studies will begin Monday at the University, as part of a collaboration of scholars from Notre Dame, Indiana University South Bend (IUSB), the Université de Provence and the Université de Toulouse.
The conference, titled "New Paradigms for Revolutionary Studies: French-American Colloquium," features several Francophone and Anglophone scholars in literature, history and art, including Lynn Hunt, a Eugen Weber Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who will deliver the keynote address.
Hunt's lecture, titled "Revolution and Subjectivity: Towards a New Paradigm?" will take place Monday at 7 p.m. in the Annenberg Auditorium in the Snite Museum of Art.
The full conference program, with lectures held both in 100 McKenna Hall and at the IUSB Student Activity Center, is posted on the conference's Web site, http://www.nd.edu/~colloque/
The events are free and open to the public.
The conference also includes an exhibit of revolutionary-era drawings featured in the Snite Museum, on display through Oct. 19. An exhibit of rare books from the revolutionary period will be available from the Special Collections of the Hesburgh Library.
"This is a historical event in that it unites Notre Dame and IUSB at the highest level of scholarly discourse," Julia Douthwaite, Notre Dame's assistant provost for international studies and professor of Romance languages and literatures, said in a press release. "It's the culmination of a collaboration I've been involved in with colleagues in France for the past two years and will bring people from around the world to participate in a bilingual conference held on both campuses."
Senior Marcus Gatto is one of the students working on the conference. He is a Romance Languages and Literatures major and said he is "very excited. It should be a very interesting conference."
The lectures, especially the keynote address, will be "focusing on the new directions that the study of revolution is taking, both in France and the United States," he said.
Douthwaite is currently teaching a French Studies course titled "A Revolution in Fiction," that Gatto said was catered specifically for the conference, and students in the course will be actively involved in the conference.
The conference was organized by Douthwaite and Lesley Walker, the chair of the department of World Language Studies at IUSB and is partially supported by Indiana University's New Frontiers in the Arts & Humanities, funded by the Lily Endowment Inc., and administered by the Indiana University Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute for European Studies.
Transportation shuttles will be provided for the events taking place at IUSB on Tuesday.
