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  • One Shields Avenue
    Sproul Hall, Room 522
    University of California
    Davis, CA 95616-8606

  • Phone: 530-752-1219
    Fax: 530-752-8630

  • Open Weekdays 8:00-12:00, 1:00-5:00


Advisers


Faculty

Chair: Julia Simon, 512B Sproul Hall, 530-752-8573
jsimon@ucdavis.edu
Ph.D. UC San Diego
Professor of French
She specializes in 18th-century French literature and culture, particularly the work of the philosophes, with special emphasis on the relevance of Enlightenment social, political, moral, and aesthetic theory today. She is the author of Beyond Contractual Morality: Ethics, Law, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century France and Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot and is currently working on a project concerning eighteenth-century music theory.
Dr. Simon's personal website

Bruce Anderson, 507 Sproul Hall
bcanderson@ucdavis.edu
Ph.D., Indiana University
Assistant Professor of French
Language Coordinator, French 1, 2, 3
He specializes in French linguistics, with an emphasis on generative morphology and syntax, formal approaches to second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and foreign language pedagogy. His publications include articles in Second Language Research and Language Acquisition.

Nicole Asquith, 509 Sproul Hall
nvasquith@ucdavis.edu
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University
Assistant Professor of French
Language Coordinator, French 23, 100
Nicole Asquith is a specialist in the theory and practice of French poetry from the French Revolution to the present. In her work, she aims at developing new ways of conceptualizing the social, cultural and political work performed by poetry in print and other media, such as recorded music, theater and graffiti. Her current project examines a debate over the social function of poetry by retracing the legacy of Rimbaud from Dada to the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Her teaching interests include French hip-hop, performance studies and cultural studies.

Jeff Fort, 503 Sproul, 530-752-0708
jpfort@ucdavis.edu
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Assistant Professor of French
Jeff Fort specializes in twentieth century prose, with a special interest in the relation between fiction, memory, and autobiography; critical theory, including modern German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger and its French reception; twentieth century French thought; aesthetics and aesthetic theory; translation. He has translated a number of literary and philosophical works such as Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab; Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry; and most recently Jacques Roubaud, The Loop.  He is currently working to complete a study of literary space and the "imperative to write" in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett.

Noah Guynn, 504 Sproul Hall, 530-754-7839
ndguynn@ucdavis.edu
Ph.D., Yale University
Associate Professor of French
Director of the Humanities Program
Recipient of ASUCD's 2004 Excellence in Teaching Award and Phi Beta Kappa's 2009 Excellence in Teaching Award

Noah Guynn is a specialist in medieval and early modern French literature, theater, and culture. His book Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages was published in The New Middle Ages Series at Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. He is currently working on a second book on ethics and politics in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century farce. Guynn's teaching interests extend from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century, and he regularly offers courses on topics such as medieval romance, Molière, and the Theater of the Absurd.

Eric Russell Webb, 508 Sproul Hall
erussell@ucdavis.edu
Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin
Assistant Professor of French
Language Coordinator, French 21, 22
Eric Russell Webb specilizes in phonology and phonetics, focusing on the role of biomechanics in the grammaticalization of sound structure.  He is especially interested in the evolution of language, the emergence of Creoles and the interface between related grammars, e.g. Romance, dialect, register.  He has published works in Linguistica Atlantica, The Morphology and Phonology of Creoles, the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies and the Journal of Language and Linguistics, among others.
Dr. Russell's personal website


Staff