The French Center of Excellence is pleased to announce it will host Dr. André Leblanc on October 30, 2025 as part of the Autumn 2025 lecture series. Dr. Leblanc's lecture, entitled Modernity of Madame de Staël and the Coppet Group, will explore French and Francophone culture, language, and society.
What do Madame de Staël and the Coppet group have to say to us, more than two hundred years after the publication in 1800 of the essay On literature, the founding work of our vision of the relationship between literature and society? In particular, what is the fate of the notion of perfectibility that underpins the historical, social and aesthetic thinking of this think-tank? In Staël's view, perfectibility is the march of the human spirit, and should apply to all fields, whether moral, political or scientific. This initially enthusiastic idea of the perfectibility and continuous progress of the human spirit came up against the despotism of Napoleon's regime, but Staël's obstinacy and curiosity for other cultures led her to persist in her opinions, to the point where she can be seen as one of the founders of the notion of interculturality. Despite the vicissitudes of history, the thinking of Staël and the Coppet group has persisted to this day, but what does Staël have to say to us? Can we draw a parallel between the dawn of Romanticism in France and our own times, marked by the questioning of so many of the principles that forged the spirit of Staël and the Coppet group?
Dr. André Leblanc is a faculty member at Högskolan Dalarna in Sweden specializing in French. Dr. Leblanc is a visiting faculty member at Ohio State for the autumn 2025 semester thanks to a Swedish STINT Foundation grant.
This event is sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series is also supported by the following departments and centers at Ohio State African American & African Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, Germanic Languages & Literatures, English, the Humanities Institute, and the Center for Languages, Literatures, & Cultures.
In December of 2020, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States selected the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University to join its prestigious network of Centers of Excellence. OSU’s Center of Excellence has the goal of promoting French and Francophone culture in the Midwest and beyond.
