Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Dr. Priya Wadhera's Success story!/ French Program

As though last summer and fall were not busy enough - with three conference papers and the publication of a peer-reviewed article, the acceptance of a second peer-reviewed article, and the submission of a third - Dr. Wadhera has had a very busy spring semester!
In January, she attended the Modern Language Association annual convention in New York City in her capacity as Forum Delegate for the Division on Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century French Languages, Literatures and Cultures.  In April, she chaired a panel and delivered a paper at Brown University at the annual 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone Studies Colloquium in which she also played an organizational role.  She is honored to have been asked to serve on the comité scientifique for next year’s conference, in which capacity she would work with a small team to select abstracts and organize panels for the colloquium which routinely draws 400 scholars from throughout the French and Francophone world. 
In addition to reworking the Brown conference paper for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, the summer will also be busy as she writes papers for two upcoming conferences.  Next fall, she will address the question of the olfactory in Proust at “Common Scents:  Smells and Social Life in European Literature (1880-1939)” at the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the University of London in England.  And in early January 2019, she will give a paper called “Albertine, Death, and Desire in Proust’s Tablescapes” as part of the panel “Albertine at 100” at the Modern Language Association annual convention in Chicago.  Both of these papers are based on research undertaken this past year for her second book, a study of how Proust's madeleine episode has been rewritten in post-war French literature.  

She is very grateful for the sabbatical leave she was granted to pursue her research so intensely and looks forward to returning to campus, especially to the classroom, this fall.