Roundtable: Women and Art in Interwar France

A roundtable discussion on women and art in Interwar France at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 11/06/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
The newly published anthology Impressions from Paris: Women Creatives in Interwar Years France studies contributions of various women artists and writers who lived in Paris from 1920 through 1940. As scholar Sylvie Blum-Reid writes in her introduction, these women helped to define the cultural and artistic practices of their era, and in doing so, they “left behind traces that still reverberate today.”
The book revisits the subjects’ experiences through various lenses that include art history, gender, fashion, literary analysis, psychology, philosophy, film, and food. The Library welcomes six contributors to this anthology for a roundtable discussion on the enduring legacies of these women.
About the speakers:
Sylvie Blum-Reid is professor of French and film at the University of Florida. Her research interests include women and fashion, travel narratives, photography, cinema, culture and expatriate female artists in the interwar period. She has written Traveling in French Cinema and East-West Encounters: Franco- Asian Cinema and Literature.
Sherry Ann Buckberrough is professor (emerita) of Art History. She was Chair of the
department of Art History at University of Hartford. She also chaired the Women’s Studies
Program. Her published writing includes New Britain Museum of American Art, Robert Delaunay: The Discovery of Simultaneity, and she has contributed to many exhibition catalogs.
Dantzel Cenatiempo is a researcher and lecturer in French Studies at the University of
Washington, with an emphasis in Gender Studies. Her research interests center on clothing
and fashion but are interdisciplinary in scope, and include 19th- and 20th-century feminisms,
critical race theory, and female biography. Her forthcoming article on Josephine Baker’s use of whiteface will be published in French Historical Studies.
Catherine R. Montfort is Professor of French and Women's and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University. She was born in Marseille, France and received her PhD from Stanford University. She is the author of several books (among them Les Fortunes de Mme de Sévigné au XVIIème et XVIIIème siècle), and has written more than forty articles and chapters on various French literary notables including Agrippa d’Aubigné, Mme de Sévigné, Charlotte Corday, Mme de Staël, Mme Campan, Vigée Lebrun, Mme de La Tour du Pin, Simone de Beauvoir, Annie Ernaux and Pierrette Fleutiaux.
Clara Oropeza is Professor of English Composition and Literature at Santa Barbara City
College. Her research brings comparative mythology to literary studies and
cultural theory. She is the author of several essays, most recent “The (Mal)Creation of Food
the Monsanto Way: Returning a Mythic Sensitivity to Food Production.” She received her PhD in Comparative Mythology and Literature from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her work has been published in Minerva Rising and SageWoman. She published her first book, titled
Anais Nin: A Myth of Her Own, in 2018.
Catherine Portuges is founding director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies,
professor emerita of Comparative Literature and Film Studies, and founding curator of the
Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her books include Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989; Gendered Subjects; and Screen Memories: the Hungarian Cinema of Márta Mészáros, and she has written chapters in multiple anthologies.
Samia Spencer is a Professor Emerita of French at Auburn University in Alabama, and the recipient of many professional honors and academic distinctions, Spencer has focused her interdisciplinary research and extensive publications on the French Enlightenment, women and politics in France and Canada, la francophonie, and contemporary women, society and institutions in France and Quebec. In recognition of her work on behalf of the French language and culture, she was appointed Honorary Consul of France in Alabama by the Republic of France, and awarded the titles of Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques and Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite. She was also inducted in Quebec’s exclusive Ordre des Francophones d’Amérique. Recently, she turned her attention to the Egyptian feminist movement of the early twentieth century. Her latest anthology, Daughters of the Nile: Egyptian Women Changing their World (2016) enjoyed worldwide acclaim and was recently translated into Arabic.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.