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Dorian F. Bell

Assistant Professor of French, French & Italian
School of Humanities

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2008

Phone: (949) 824-6976
Fax: (949) 824-1031
Email: dorianb@uci.edu

University of California
317 Humanities Hall
Mail Code: 2925
Irvine, CA 92697

picture of Dorian F. Bell

Research
Interests
19th- and 20th-century French literature and culture; empire studies; anti-Semitism; fin-de-siècle intellectual history; literature and science; literature and philosophy; film studies
   
Academic
Distinctions
Dean's Scholar, Graduate Division of the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 2006

Naomi Schor Memorial Award for best graduate student paper, Nineteenth Century French Studies Colloquium, 2004
   
Appointments Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford Humanities Fellows Program, Department of French and Italian, Stanford University, 2007-2008
   
Research
Abstract
My research has generally sought to bring literary poetics to bear on the history of ideologies. I have been particularly interested in the novel and its place within the nineteenth century's crescendoing debates about empire and race. My current book project, entitled "Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism, Empire, and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France," examines sites of articulation between late nineteenth-century French imperialism and anti-Semitism. Noting the contribution of novels both canonical and non-canonical to the negative association of Jews with empire in the French imaginary, I document how the imperial frontier spawned a narrative frontier that helped metropolitan anti-Semitism adopt its modern racial and economic guise. I suggest that, in turn, French anti-Semitism shifted the discursive parameters of the imperialist project itself.
   
Publications "Maupassant and the Limits of the Self," Romanic Review (forthcoming)
   
  "Agent OSS 117: France, Colonial Memory, and the Politics of Parody," Contemporary French Civilization (forthcoming)
   
  "The Jew as Model: Anti-Semitism, Aesthetics, and Epistemology in the Goncourt Brothers' Manette Salomon," Modern Language Notes 124: 4 (September 2009): 825-47.
   
  "Cavemen Among Us: Genealogies of Atavism from Zola's La Bête humaine to Chabrol's Le Boucher," French Studies 62: 1 (January 2008): 39-52.
   
Grants Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies
   
Jeanne Marandon Fellowship, Society of French and Francophone Professors of America
   
Florence Gould Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for Research in France, Council for European Studies, Columbia University
   
William Penn Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania
   
French Institute for Culture and Technology Travel Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania
   
Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship (Arabic), University of Pennsylvania
   
Fulbright US Student Program Grant, Tunisia
   
Other Experience Elected to the Modern Language Association's Executive Council
2006—2009

Link to this profile http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5564
   
Last updated 11/06/2009