Daniel Desormeaux
Associate Professor of French Literature
Office: Wieboldt 223
ddd@uchicago.edu
Professor Daniel Desormeaux’s scholarly work focuses on the historico-anthropological link between French literature and culture and French Caribbean literatures and cultures since the Haitian Revolution. A native of Haiti, he has been educated in Canada and the United States. His interests include relations of French literature and history of ideas throughout the nineteenth-century, critical interpretation of authorship and collections, comparative analysis of French literature and other arts, development of new cultural institutions from the French Revolution to the late nineteenth-century, and the Haitian Revolution and slavery in Saint Domingue. He published numerous essays and a book entitled La Figure du bibliomane (2001) that address these topics. He is currently completing a critical edition of Toussaint Louverture’s memoirs, a monography on Alexandre Dumas, and a collection of essays on French Caribbean novels.
Education
- PhD in French, Emory University 1993
- MA in French, The Johns Hopkins University, 1990
- MA in Semiotics & Literary Studies, Université du Québec (Montréal), 1987
Awards, Honors, and Professional Experience
- National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, 2008-2009
- Has taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Kentucky
Selected Courses Taught
- Baudelaire & Flaubert
- Dumas
- Exotic Narrative: Texts and Contexts of Caribbean Culture
- Les Lieux de la Création: l'Atelier Imaginaire
- Romantique & Romanesque
- Revolutions, Arts and Literatures in the Nineteenth Century Europe
- Narratives of class, race, and culture in French and Francophone Literature
- Le génie français: Between Nation and Colonization
- Religion and Identity: Committee Social Theory, interdisciplinary seminar
- L'Ordre du temps: Mémoires, Histoire et Autobiographie