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Hannah Frydman wins the Larry Schehr Memorial Award

Crossposted from French & Italian Studies.

At the end of last quarter, Assistant Professor of French Hannah Frydman won the Larry Schehr Memorial Award for the best essay at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium by an untenured PhD within the first six years since receiving the degree for her essay, “Confidences épistolaires de la Vénus publique’: Le Figaro’s Petite Correspondance and the Business and Pleasure of Sharing Private Messages in Public.” Professor Frydman also presented her paper as part of a panel on “Women Readers” at the 47th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium in New York City in November of 2022.

Frydman says the essay came “out of my interest in the history of inexpensive newspaper advertising and the way it allowed ordinary people to communicate privately in public to a variety of different ends.” In working to finish revising her book manuscript, Between the Sheets: Classified Advertising, Sexuality, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, she realized that there were some things in the pre-history of the story she was telling that she didn’t know.

Research led her to a personal ad column created in 1875 in the daily newspaper Le Figaro called the petite correspondance that was critiqued for facilitating adultery and sexual commerce because it allowed people to correspond anonymously via newspaper (for a fee), rather than having to write directly to someone they should not, but it was also incredibly popular with readers who enjoyed reading strangers’ (supposedly real) private missives. Frydman notes it’s “interesting to try to think about as a precursor to social media and its “own monetization of our making the intimate very public.”

 In her essay, Frydman traces the brief but consequential life of the petites correspondances in order to argue for “its importance in the intertwined history of press and sexuality.”  Frydman shows how they introduced a “form of exhibitionism and voyeurism into the press in the very years that witnessed the buildup of fears about the spread of pornography and the conception of new laws freeing the press.” In this climate she writes “moral critiques led to the closure of the column after a few years, but its monetization of a voyeuristic experience of reading the “real” sexual intrigues of anonymous others was to have a long afterlife.”

 The research for this essay and for her work more broadly is threaded throughout two courses she will be teaching this year, FRENCH 223: Sex, Commerce and the Making of Modern Paris, which explores how sex and commerce together shaped ideas about Paris and the city’s topography, and FRENCH 447: Queer Histories and Fictions, on histories and fictions of non-normative sexuality, which also explores the “business and pleasure” of reading potentially real fictions. For Textual Studies, she will also be teaching core course TXTDS 403: Archives, Data and Databases: Thinking with Archives (offered jointly with FRENCH 435) in Autumn 2023.

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Announcements Faculty & Staff

TXTDS-Affiliated Faculty Receive Course Development Funding

First published Friday, December 16, 2022. Edited Tuesday, December 20 to reflect change to ITAL 262 offer quarter.

The UW Translation Studies Hub has made their 2022-2023 academic year goal to increase translation literacy across the course offerings at the university, making translation literacy a priority in the undergraduate curriculum. Two French & Italian Studies and Textual Studies Program faculty were granted $250 in research funding via the Simpson Center to develop translation-focused modules for existing courses.

For the course “Sex, Commerce, and the Making of Modern Paris” (FRENCH 223), taught next in Winter 2023, French Professor Hannah Frydman will create a new course module which introduces students to analyzing primary sources (in English translation) and integrating them into historical writing. The new module will ask students to think critically about what sources have been translated for their use, what kinds of sources have been left untranslated, why this might be, and how this impacts what those who do not read French are able to know about the past. Students in the course will also consider how machine translation might offer access to sources that human translators have not yet chosen to translate for the classroom.

Italian Professor and French & Italian Studies Chair Beatrice Arduini will create a new course module for her course “Dante’s Divine Comedy” (ITAL 262), to be offered next in Autumn 2023. The module discusses if and how translations aim to establish a conclusive authority for a medieval poem with a complex textual history such as Dante’s Comedy. The very title “Divine Comedy” appeared for the first time in a 1555 printed edition, and the modern standard critical edition on which all modern English translations are based was adopted in Italy only in the 1960s. This course module will pose the question: What do we translate when we translate Dante, and what do the translations reflect?

Prof. Arduini’s Dante course is eligible as an elective course for our undergraduate Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. She will also teach core course TXTDS 401 / TXTDS 501: Text Technologies: Reading and Writing in the Middle Ages (offered jointly with HONORS 211 and FRENCH 474) in Winter 2023.

Prof. Frydman will teach core course TXTDS 403: Archives, Data and Databases: Thinking with Archives (offered jointly with FRENCH 435) in Autumn 2023.

Categories
Announcements Faculty & Staff Research

Professor Hannah Frydman Wins Malcolm Bowie Prize

Congratulations to Professor of French Hannah Frydman for her receipt of the Malcolm Bowie Prize from the Society for French Studies!

The Bowie Prize goes to the best article published in the preceding year by an early-career researcher in French Studies. Frydman’s article, “Freedom’s Sex Problem: Classified Advertising, Law, and the Politics of Reading in Third Republic France,” was selected by a panel which included Diana Holmes (University of Leeds, Panel Chair, and Society of French Studies Vice-President), Shirley Jordan (Newcastle University), Judith Miller (NYU), Michael Syrotinski (University of Glasgow, Society of French Studies President), and Downing Thomas (University of Iowa).

The panel describes her article:

Through the lens of newly developed classified advertising, this essay analyses the Third Republic’s effort to police reproduction and sexuality at the expense of the regime’s formal commitment to democratic freedom and expression. The judges found it to be a very fine piece of historical writing, meticulously researched and argued, providing a fascinating window into morality laws of the period and the ways in which they attempted to manage language, alongside an exploration of the complexities this situation brought to the commercial landscape of periodicals. It offers an original and illuminating perspective on sexuality and gender relations in the early decades of the Third Republic.

The article, published in French Historical Studies, is free to access through August 2022 from the Duke University Press.

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Announcements Faculty & Staff Research

New Publication by Professor Hannah Frydman

New Assistant Professor of French Studies Hannah Frydman has published the article, “Freedom’s Sex Problem: Classified Advertising, Law, and the Politics of Reading in Third Republic France,” in French Historical Studies (volume 44, number 4).

The article traces the history of legal responses to so-called immorality (e.g. abortion, sex work, non-normative sex) in the classified pages of the Parisian press. In particular, she shows how decades of judicial uncertainty about whether obscenity law permitted the symptomatic reading of coded ads — or if only surface reading was allowed — protected the freedom of the press, a freedom endangered by attempts to make mass media inhospitable to sexual advertising.

The article is available on the Duke University Press site.