Melanie Hawthorne, Cornerstone Professor of French in Texas A&M’s Department of International Studies, will present a lecture titled “Forgetting Gisèle d’Estoc: Lessons in Cultural Memory,” on Thursday, March 3, at 4:10 p.m. in Taylor Science Center room 3042. The lecture is sponsored by Hamilton’s Humanities Forum and is free and open to the public.
Hawthorne received her degrees from Oxford University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism — which received a national award (the Modern Language Association of America’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for 2001)— along with articles, edited books and translations. Her most recent publication is Finding the Woman Who Didn’t Exist: The Curious Life of Gisèle d’Estoc (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).
Hawthorne’s research centers on 19th- and 20th-century French literature, with special emphasis on prose fiction of the “Decadent” period and on women writers. She is interested in how narrative expectations shape the stories we find compelling, and in particular the conventions of life-writing. She is currently engaged in a series of projects related to the work of the Anglo-French writer known as Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn, 1877-1909).