Ian Curtis is an Assistant Professor of French at Kenyon College, where his research and teaching interests center on postwar French literature and film, youth culture, and the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in France.
He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2020, after completing a Master’s in psychoanalysis at the Université de Paris, VIII, and an A.B. with highest honors in French at Kenyon College.
In 2017-2018, Curtis was a visiting student in the Department of History at Sciences Po, and a pensionnaire étranger at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm. His talk today is adapted from his book manuscript, The J3 Affair (1948-1951): Modern Literature and the Memory of Occupation in a Postwar Murder in France.
Based on his dissertation research, for which Curtis was awarded the Marguerite A. Peyre Prize from the Department of French at Yale University, Curtis’s monograph is built on an original archival discovery, and retraces and analyses a crime committed in the name of literature and philosophy.
Short summary by Dr. Curtis:
“The subject of this talk is borrowed from my book manuscript, which retraces and analyzes a judicial affair that contemporaries described as one of the most important criminal cases of twentieth-century France.
Pleading Literature examines the numerous instances during the affair when canonical and popular works of fiction came under the scrutiny of journalists, psychiatrists, and judges.
Tracing discussions about books and their authors among the protagonists of the affair, in the press, and in the courtroom, I explore the ideological differences these literary debates reveal and offer perspectives on the competing theories of juvenile crime onto which they can be mapped.”
