Hassan Melehy

Education

Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, 1993

MA, French, University of Minnesota, 1990

MA, Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, 1987

BA, Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1983

About Professor Melehy

Hassan Melehy is a scholar of the French Renaissance with a wide range of other interests. In 2016 he published Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory (Bloomsbury), which explores the role of the Jack Kerouac's native French in his writing. In 2017, Professor Melehy published A Modest Apocalypse (Eyewear), a book of poems, and he has also written numerous articles on early modern literature and philosophy, recent and contemporary critical theory, and film studies. He teaches courses on all these subjects to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Professor Melehy's current research focuses on the relationship of political thought to literature in Renaissance France and England, a follow-up to his 2010 book, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Ashgate, reissued by Routledge, 2016).

Professor Melehy has been an invited speaker at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Barnard College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Giessen in Germany. In 2017, he gave a lecture on Kerouac at the University of Massachusetts campus in the Beat Generation author's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Publications, Articles, & Presentations

“Kerouac, Multilingualism, and Global Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Kerouac. Ed. Steven Belletto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 207–22.

“A Composer’s Way with Words.” The Many Worlds of David Amram: Renaissance Man of American Music. Ed. Dean Birkenkamp. New York: Routledge, 2023. 160–70.

“Le néo-stoïcisme ou la pensée de l’antisocial: Montaigne converse avec Lipse.” Montaigne et le social. Ed. Philippe Desan. Paris: Hermann, 2022. 297–315.

“Spaces of the State: Montaigne and a Few Others.” Visions of Space. Ed. Dorothea Heitsch and Jeremie C. Korta. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 2021. 363–384.

“Godard Gets the Blues: Movies, Music, and Baraka.” L’Esprit Créateur 58.4 (Winter 2018): 64–82.

“Cyborg.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. Ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. 433–35.

“Off the Human Track: Montaigne, Deleuze, and the Materialization of Philosophy.” Early Modern Ecologies. Ed. Phillip John Usher and Pauline Goul. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 23–47

“Du Bellay and La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse.” A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Christopher Prendergast. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 137–54.

Dissertations

Che Sokol. Sens(ing) and Self: A Haptic ‘Look’ at Multi-Sensory Representations of Women’s Labor and Artistic Production in Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French Diasporic Cinema Post-2000. Summer 2024.

Azza Ben Youssef. Questionnement identitaire, langue(s) et écriture chez des écrivain-e-s maghrébin-e-s d’expression française et arabe. Spring 2024.

Alexandra Goldych. Spacemaking and Placemaking: Franco-Algerian Gender, Language, and Geography. Spring 2024.

Irina Randriamiadana. Des goûts (dégoût) des autres: Analyse décoloniale du discours sensoriel et de sa représentation. Spring 2024.

El Habib Louai. Chronicling a Cultural Encounter in the Interzone: Social Unconventionality, Hobo Reclusions and Countercultural Agency in the Writings of Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet, Larbi Layachi, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Co-directed with Prof. Nourdin Bejjit. Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco. Spring 2019.

Typical Courses

FREN 562: Poetry and Poetics of the French Renaissance.

FREN 563/CMPL 563: Studies in the Anglo-French Renaissance.

FREN 388-FREN 389: The History of French Cinema I & II.