French professor Lawrence Kritzman recently received close to $100,000 in grants from the French Embassy and contributions from American colleges and universities to sponsor an annual conference on French cultural studies.
The five-week conference, called the Edouard Morot-Sir Institute for French Cultural Studies, is the first of its kind.
French professors from prestigious academic institutions such as Williams College, Brandeis University and Cornell University will also attend the Institute, which will be held at Dartmouth June 28 through July 27.
Kritzman said he believes the Institute "will help make French a stronger discipline in the next century."
The invited scholars will examine the theme "Culture and Memory in France."
The Institute is sponsored by the Committee for the Future of French Studies, which Kritzman founded in early 1991. The Committee is made up of 18 French professors from across the country and receives $10,000 a year from the French Embassy.
In addition to its annual budget of $10,000, the Committee received an additional $20,000 from the French government to organize the Institute, named for a former Conseiller Culturel of the French Embassy and French Studies professor.
Between May and September 1993 Kritzman raised an additional $68,000 from 32 American colleges and universities. The money was raised through an intensive letter-writing campaign and demonstrated "the power of the telephone," Kritzman said.
Kritzman founded the Committee for the Future of French Studies "out of a concern that the teaching of French should more directly address the changing needs of our students," by offering more diversity in the curriculum and moving away from a purely literary approach to teaching French.
The faculty of the Edouard Morot-Sir Institute will include leading French intellectuals like Annette Insdorf, a film professor specializing in French film from Columbia University; Pierre Nora, a historian from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the director of the prestigious French publishing house, Gallimard; and Alice Yeager Kaplan, a specialist in French cultural studies from Duke University.
French Professor Katharine Conley said the Institute is part of a growing interest in French Cultural Studies and the realization that "the French language can be used to teach subjects other than literature, such as history and culture."
The Institute is particularly important because "it will assess the future of French Studies as a discipline," Conley said.
In addition, the Institute will foster "a dialogue between French and American thinkers and intellectuals," she said.
The site of the Institute will change from year to year. Next year, for example, the Institute will take place at Northwestern University.
This year's Institute will feature four ot five lectures that will be open to the Hanover community.
