Helen Solterer
· Professor of Romance StudiesDuke University · Romance Studies
Active 1984–2024
About
Helen Solterer is a Professor of Romance Studies. The page includes her name and title but does not provide additional biographical details, research focus, background, or key contributions.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Art
- History
- Political Science
- Gender studies
- Art history
- Epistemology
- Philosophy
- Linguistics
- Visual arts
- Literature
- Law
- Media studies
Selected publications
Migrants shaping Europe, past and present: A roundtable
postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies · 2024 · 1 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Sociology
- History
2023-09-01
book1st authorCorrespondingManchester University Press eBooks · 2022-11-08
book-chapterOpen accessSenior authorThis image-rich piece presents the small experimental installation, “In Transit: Arts and Migration Around Europe,” from the Nasher Museum of Art, 2018: the collective work of faculty and students at Duke University. Traversing many time-periods, from the early thirteenth century to the current-day, the objects propose different ways that migration may be represented and expressed across various cultures around Europe. Through multiple perspectives, “In Transit” broadens our understanding of the history of migration by juxtaposing present-day artworks with those of early modern cultures. It extends the maps and its usual routes, from the ideological East–West axis, to that of the global South northwards. The “In Transit” works, made with paper, textiles, metal, and digital pixels, present artworks that are an integral part of people’s everyday actions: a painting of Abraham Cresques’s 137–80 Catalan Atlas next to Pedro Lasch’s video installation, Sing Along or Karaoke Anthem (2015); Jacques Callot’s etchings of the Bohemians (c. 1650) juxtaposed with Annette Messager’s woolen weaving of Two Replicants Together (2016). Together they materialize the lives of those who leave their homes – whatever their reasons – to flee persecution, to overcome economic hardship, to pursue a better life for themselves and their families. As a whole, the installation shows how artists respond to the movement of people over centuries, capturing the dilemmas of displaced individuals that are often their own. It creates new profiles of migrants.
Manchester University Press eBooks · 2022-11-08
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingA base of military operations a commercial dpt, a fortress the last city England would abandon." 1 Is this post Brexit Calais today, acting as security guard for the British? 2 Or post 2018, when the Sandhurst treaty fixed the French-British border there, on the European continent? (Gurin, 2018) This is, in fact, Calais in 1396: a portrait of the port city after a brutal siege, drawn by writers. They speak of Calais at a time when an early treaty in the long line of Franco-English agreements was negotiated, when it first became a part of England. These chroniclers signal the quandary facing inhabitants blocked in the city and environs.
Manchester University Press eBooks · 2022-11-08
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe introduction lays out the central argument of the volume, which has three main strands: 1) those named most often by others as “migrants” do not represent a sudden, unprecedented crisis but are part of a long line of people who have come from “elsewhere” to participate in European life; 2) this long-running circulation of men, women, and children has always been accompanied by the movement of inventive ideas; 3) displaced and dispossessed peoples have shaped European culture in a major way over many centuries. To make its point, the volume conceputalizes “migrants” in a new way, paying special attention to the existence of premodern migrants. It offers three groups of case studies, organized by language – Spanish, Italian, and French – which examine the growing and changing ensemble of representations in speech, writing, visual arts, and other objects that people create in search of a sense of self.
Speculum · 2021-06-22
article1st authorCorrespondingA Timely Villon: Anachrony and Premodern Poetic Fiction
New Literary History · 2021 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Literature
- Philosophy
- History
Jacques Rancière's poetic concept of anachrony provides a critical tool for probing the many times of premodern poetry. By suggesting the way poems "take time against the grain," anachrony helps us to entertain them as "modes of connection," as "events," that can become present in times other than when they were first created. In Rancière's terms, anachronous poems make leaps in time, and activated once more, engage publics in various new places, about questions foreign to their first era. My test case in this essay: The Ballad of the Hanged Men and The Testament of François Villon. By examining literary translations of Villon's poetry in a growing transnational context, I argue for the unpredictable timeliness of this poetic fiction. In this argument, numerous creators compose Villon anew, including, for example, Édouard Glissant and his poems, other Black poets in the US, as well as writers in Enlightenment and modern-day Europe, in Japan around 1900, too. Such an understanding of Villon's poetry leads to a model of premodern fiction that encompasses the many instances it makes history.
Noah D. Guynn, Pure Filth: Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Early French Farce
Speculum · 2021-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingSpeculum · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Art history
Poétiques de Paul Zumthor (1915-2015)
Classiques GARNIER · 2019-01-01
articleOpen accessCet ouvrage explore les trois grandes poétiques de Paul Zumthor : les poétiques médiévales, les poétiques de la voix qui s’en détachèrent pour fonder de nouvelles approches des oralités vivantes, les poétiques nomades, vouées aux voies parallèles et croisées suivies par le chercheur, l’homme et le créateur.
Frequent coauthors
- 1 shared
Michel Zink
- 1 shared
Antônio Carlos Barreto
Imperial College London
- 1 shared
Raísa França Bastos
- 1 shared
Francis Gingras
- 1 shared
Kathleen Biddick
Pennsylvania State University
- 1 shared
Éric Méchoulan
- 1 shared
Pedro Lasch
- 1 shared
Marianne Eileen Wardle
Awards & honors
- Duke Guggenheim Fellow
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