Associate Professor in French literature in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University (Evanston).
Visiting Professor 2024-2025 – from 20th of March to 20th of April, 2024
Inviting Professor: Lucy Rumsey
Biography
Matthieu Dupas is an Associate Professor in French literature in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University (Evanston). He holds a doctorate from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle (2015) and a PhD from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) (2017). His research focuses on seventeenth-century literature, gender and sexuality.
Collaboration with IHRIM Laboratory
Matthieu Dupas' visit is part of a 15-year exchange of professors and researchers between ENS de Lyon and Northwestern University in the fields of literature, literary and cultural theory, and philosophy. His stay will not only help to strengthen institutional collaboration, but will also launch a dialogue between researchers from these two institutions and IHRIM on 17th-century French literature.
Matthieu Dupas will also be working on his current book project, following the publication in 2023 by Classiques Garnier of his first monograph: La Galanterie comme mode de vie : Amour, civilité et mariage dans Mélite ou les Fausses lettres de Pierre Corneille. He is now proposing to study the way in which the literary works of the period articulate new ethics of love that closely link the erotic and ethical dispositions of the characters, in a cultural context marked by the emergence and spread of the social norms and behavioural protocols of gallantry. This project could be the subject of discussions with researchers at ENS Lyon, in particular Isabelle Moreau, Mathilde Bombart, whose work intersects with Professor Dupas's interests in the ethics of love and libertinage. Matthieu Dupas also hopes to collaborate with specialists in queer theory and gender and sexuality studies in literature.
Matthieu Dupas' visit will also have an educational dimension for students and PhD candidates at ENS de Lyon. They will have the opportunity to meet a French researcher who is pursuing an international scientific career in the United States, and to attend the three lectures he plans to give. Two of these lectures will deal with plays by Corneille: Le Menteur (1644) and La Place Royale (1634), which are on the syllabus for the 2025 agrégation. The third will be entitled ‘Dire ou ne pas dire la Carte de Tendre: l'incivilité dans les Précieuses Ridicules de Molière’.
Internationally, Matthieu Dupas' invitation is also a major boost to the exchange of teacher-researchers between ENS de Lyon and Northwestern, the School's strategic partner in the United States in the humanities. Northwestern's French Interdisciplinary Group, which manages this exchange, has suffered serious budget cuts in 2024. It is therefore particularly important to point out to its supervisory bodies how important it is for the School to maintain this strategic relationship, especially at a time when Northwestern continues to welcome up to three students from the School each year for study and research visits.
Conferences
Matthieu Dupas' visit will also have an educational dimension for pupils, students and PhD candidates at ENS de Lyon. They will have the opportunity to meet a French researcher who is pursuing an international scientific career in the United States and to attend the three conferences he plans to give:
- Monday 31 March, 16:00-18:00, D2 003 - Rencontre Matthieu Dupas (Northwestern University) - Lewis Seifert (Brown University) : ‘ Théoriser la galanterie : normes de genre, discours et pratiques sociales au XVIIe siècle ’. Meeting co-organised by Sacha Grangean and Isabelle Moreau.
- Thursday 3 April, 4-6 pm, D2-115 - Lecture by Matthieu Dupas (Northwestern University): ‘L'amitié homosociale entre incivilité et contre-conduite dans La Place Royale (1634) de Corneille’.
- Friday 11 April, 14h-16h, D2 034 - Discussion with Matthieu Dupas (Northwestern University), on his latest book: La Galanterie comme mode de vie. Amour, civilité et mariage dans Mélite ou les fausses lettres (1629) by Pierre Corneille, Classiques Garnier, coll. ‘ Masculin/féminin dans l'Europe moderne ’, 2023.
These meetings are aimed at :
- students, PhD candidates and researchers working on Corneille and classical literature,
- students and PhD candidates in literature, gender and sexuality,
- and, more generally, anyone interested in the society and representations of early modernity.
Access for non-ENS students is subject to prior registration.
Please write to: sacha.grangean [at] ens-lyon.fr (specify your name and institution)
Major publications
Books
Dupas, Matthieu. La Galanterie comme Mode de vie : Amour, civilité et mariage dans Mélite ou les Fausses lettres de Pierre Corneille. Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2023.
Articles (selection)
- “Saynète no 19 : M. Dupas/Euripide,” Rédaction du Mouvement Transitions, July 6, 2024, retrieved July 12, 2024. https://mtransitions.hypotheses.org/4955
- “Saynète no 8.1: M. Dupas/Molière,” Rédaction du Mouvement Transitions, May 6, 2023, retrieved March 14, 2024. https://mtransitions.hypotheses.org/2906
- “Gallantry and Matrimonial Heterosexuality: Love, and Friendship in Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre (1654),” Exemplaria 32.2 (2020): 130-144. https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2020.1810969
- “Lesbianism in Benserade’s Iphis et Iante (1634): Gallantry and the Making of Heterosexuality in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Ovidian Transversions:“Iphis and Ianthe,” 1350-1650, co-edited by Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken, University of Edinburgh Press, 2019, pp. 241-260.
- “Sophonisbe queer? Maitrise de l’Amour et Genre chez les Héroïnes de Corneille,” in Myriam Dufour-Maitre (éd.), Héros ou personnages? Le personnel du théâtre de Corneille, Rouen, Presses Universitaires de Rouen et Le Havre, 2013, pp. 63-80.
- “Polygraphie et Hybridation des Genres dans la Dramaturgie Cornélienne”, PFSCL XXXVIII, 74 (2011): 143-157.
- “La Notion de Terrain dans les Documents Pédagogiques,” co-auth. Stéphanie Burette et Marion Mas, in Jean-Louis Chiss, Christian Puech, Hélène Merlin-Kajman (dir.), Le Français, Discipline d’Enseignement : Histoire, Champ, Terrain, Paris, Riveneuve, 2011, pp. 253-267.
- “Ce que Halperin Veut Dire,” Entretien avec David M. Halperin, La Revue Monstre, 3 (2011): 9-13.
- “La Sodomie dans l’Affaire Théophile de Viau: Questions de Genre et de Sexualité dans la France du Premier XVIIe siècle,” Les Dossiers du Grihl [en ligne], 2010-11 (April 16, 2010). http://dossiersgrihl.revues.org/3934
- “Discussion (Septembre 2010),” co-auth. Vincent Douris, Gabriel Girard, et David Halperin, in David Halperin (et alii), Que veulent les Gays? Essai sur le sexe, le risque et la subjectivité, Paris, Amsterdam, 2010, pp. 163-185.
Translations
- What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007; revised edition, 2009). 170 pp. (French translation by Matthieu Dupas [Paris: Amsterdam, 2010].) DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.296688