Gayle A. Levy, Associate Professor of French, (B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1987; M.A., The Johns Hopkins University, 1990; Ph.D., Duke University, 1995).  Affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies.  French 19th- and 20th-century literature, French Cultural Studies, French film, French women writers and French feminist theory.  Author of Refiguring the Muse (Bern: Peter Lang A. G., 1999) and “Reading dans Tous les Sens: Notes on Teaching Un coup de dés,” in Modern French Literary Studies in the Classroom: Pedagogical Strategies, Charles J. Stivale, editor, (New York: MLA Publications, 2004) in addition to numerous essays and reviews that appear in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Contemporary French Civilization, College Literature, Excavatio, The Feminist Companion to French Literature, and Dictionary of Literary Biographies.  My translations of essays by Pascal Ory and Christophe Charle will appear in the new English translation of Les Lieux de mémoire by Pierre Nora, David P. Jordan, editor, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 2010).

My current teaching and research encompasses both the 19th and 20th centuries. I am at work on a manuscript entitled The Vocabulary of Empire: French Resistance Fighters and the Wars of Decolonization in which I evaluate the ways that participants in both the French Resistance and the wars of decolonization talk about empire. Nonetheless, I am still actively involved in 19th-century French studies, especially working on the poets Sully-Prudhomme and Renée Vivien, two turn-of-the-century writers.  My new essay on Renée Vivien came out in the summer of 2009 in Renée Vivien à rebours.  In addition to my research and teaching, I also direct the UMKC Honors Program and thus spend a lot of time thinking about honors pedagogy and administration.