Professor and Chair of the Department of Language and Culture Studies at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), Sara is the author of Writing It Twice: Self- Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (Northwestern UP, 2015), co-editor of Being Contemporary : French Literature, Culture, and Politics Today (Liverpool UP, 2016), and author of a forthcoming monograph tentatively titled Projects for a Revolution in New York: How Postwar French Literature Became American. Her scholarship draws on translation theory, book history, archival research, and media studies to frame our understanding of 20^th and 21^st-century French fiction.

Oppède: A Cultural History of an Artists’ Commune in Wartime France

This project offers the first cultural history of wartime Oppède as both place and book. It was, first, a site of a visionary experiment in 1940 when a group of artists collectively restored a medieval town in southeastern France that served as a safe haven for minorities and fellow artists. Oppède is also the name of Consuelo de St. Exupéry’s long-forgotten novel, whose transnational publishing history complicates narratives of that period. Conceived as an experimental scholarly project, this cultural history will draw inspiration from the residency experience itself—situated, as I will be, in a community for artistic and cultural exchange, not far from the village of Oppède—as a critical framework.