ROMS Colloquium

Please join us on Wednesday, November 9th at 3:15 pm in Toy Lounge for the November ROMS colloquium, the last colloquium of the fall semester. The November colloquium will feature presentations on “Contact Zones” by Elena Peña-Argüeso, Ph.D Student in Spanish, Azza Ben Youssef, Ph.D Student in French, and Dr. Cécile Ruel, Teaching Assistant Professor in French.

Below you will find the title and description of the presenters’ work:

• Elena Peña-Argüeso, “Comedy-news” or “dramatized news pamphlets?”
  My research examines why the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega chooses to represent the Dutch in his plays as a multifaceted rival (politically, religiously, economically). I will present about the premiere of works about the Hispano-Dutch conflict in a short period of time during the early 17th century, the publicity of this period and how the masses were informed creating public opinion through entertainment in Early Modern Spain.
• Azza Ben Youssef,  Identity, language, and writing in Maghrebian writers of French and Arabic expression
  My primary corpus comprises sixteen primary sources across geographic spaces ranging from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco to France and Belgium by a diverse group of authors that include two men, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Abdelwaheb Meddeb, as well as two women writers of Arabic expression, Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Leila Abouzeid. The bilingualism of the primary sources is obviously not fortuitous. In fact, it is the correlation between identity and language(s)that constitutes the main axis of my dissertation because the authors I discuss maintain, due to their family history, their place of birth, their education, or their intellectual background, a unique relationship with both the French and the Arabic languages. My research features the complex relationship that the writers of my corpus entertain with the language they write in, ranging from an adversarial or deconstructive stance to a more conciliatory state of suspension in-between-languages.
• Dr. Cécile Ruel, A look at three representations of the U.S. by 20^th century French writers.
  In my presentation for the panel on “contact zones”, I will look at three 20^th century travel narratives (which could also be called narratives of place), by three French writers: Jean Baudrillard’s America, Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day and Michel Butor’s Mobile. As at least two of the book titles suggest, the tree texts are attempts at representing a place, the United States, where all three authors have spent some time. I will show how, in the case of each writer, the travel narrative becomes a site for consigning memories, for reflecting on the places visited and the people encountered, and also for experimenting with a different and new mode of writing.

For any questions, please contact the Colloquium organizers,
Pina Gemboni (giu22@live.unc.edu) and Parker Brookie (pbrookie@live.unc.edu