DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Matthieu Dupas is an Assistant Professor of French. He received a PhD in French Literature from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and a PhD in French from the University of Michigan. He earned his BA and MA in Classics from the Université de Paris IV—Sorbonne and holds the Agrégation in Classics.

His research addresses the representations of gender and sexuality in early modern and contemporary French literatures, the history and the theory of gender and sexuality, queer theory.

His forthcoming book, Corneille galant: Genre et sexualité dans la comédie cornélienne (Classiques Garnier), reads Pierre Corneille’s youth comedies from the viewpoint of the history of sexuality, and shows how the aesthetics of gallantry served to reconfigure gender identities and erotic subjectivities in 17^th-century France, thereby paving the way for heterosexuality on the threshold of modernity.

His second book project addresses the representations of gender and sexuality in contemporary French novels written by Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq, and Guillaume Dustan. He calls “postsexual” the aesthetics of these writings where sexual representations are explicit and yet not transgressive. He accounts for this aesthetics in relation to the decline of heterosexual hegemony in the gay marriage era.

Before coming to Northwestern, he was a postdoctoral fellow in French at the University of Michigan, where he taught courses on 17^th-century French literature, the contemporary French novel, and French-speaking cinema, among many others.

His articles and book reviews have been published, or are forthcoming, in Contemporary French Civilization ; Papers For Seventeenth-Century French Literature ; La Revue Monstre ; Le Français, Discipline d’Enseignement: Histoire, Champ, Terrain ; Héros ou personnages? Le personnel du théâtre de Corneille (Myriam Dufour-Maitre ed) ; A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment (Mitchell Greenberg, ed) ; “Iphis and Ianthe” and its Medieval and Early Modern Transversions (Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken, ed).

He has also translated into French David Halperin’s What do gay men want? published by Editions Amsterdam as Que veulent les Gays? in 2010.