DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Dylan Bess is a PhD student in French and Francophone Studies at Northwestern University. He received his BA in Francophone Studies from Bowdoin College in 2021. In his honors thesis, "Le val et le cadre : espaces mortivitaux de Rimbaud et de Mouawad," he explored through philosophical and literary analyses the relationship between death and the pursuit of meaning, coining the term "mortivitalité" to qualify the experiential space between life and death traveled by the protagonists of Arthur Rimbaud's "Le dormeur du val" and Wajdi Mouawad's Seuls. His current research interests are in 19th- to 20th-century Caribbean and French philosophy/literature and 20th-century French film. 

Before joining Northwestern's Department of French and Italian, he worked for two years as a chemist and a metrologist in Saint Louis, Missouri.