The French Center of Excellence is pleased to announce it will host Professor Nicolas Valazza on October 16, 2025 as part of the Autumn 2025 lecture series. Professor Valazza's lecture, entitled "Le Livre enflammé. Fictions et poétique de l'autodafé ", will explore French and Francophone culture, language, and society.
Professor Valazza's third book, Le Livre enflammé. Fictions et poétique de l'autodafé (Hermann, 2024), examines the fictional theme of book burning in nineteenth-century French novels and poetry, at a time when several historical libraries were destroyed during the successive French revolutions. What is the significance of burning a book (or a library) within a book? Is it an act of self-reflection by the writer, concerned about the fate of their own work, or does it reveal a broader cultural anxiety about the fate of books, the transmission of knowledge, as well as freedom of expression and the press, or all of the above? These issues are more topical than ever, as books continue to be banned if not burned, and more and more academic and public libraries dematerialize their collections. Thus, the question of the transformation of books needs to be urgently addressed, not only from an economic and technological standpoint, but more decisively from the perspective of the humanities.
Nicolas Valazza is a Professor of French and Italian at Indiana University Bloomington. His primary research interests lie in the relationship between painting and literature, poetry and book history in 19th-century France.
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.
