Lynn A. Higgins
Appointments
Interim Chair, Film & Media Studies (winter 2025)
Edward Tuck Professor of French Emerita
Formal Affiliations with Comparative Literature; Film & Media Studies; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Area of Expertise
20th-century French cultural studies,
prose fiction,
French cinema,
women filmmakers,
feminist criticism and theory,
fiction and the history/politics of memory
Biography
My teaching and research interests include French cinema; 20th-century French novel; women filmmakers; adaptation; literary criticism and theory; literature, film, and the representation of history, the politics of memory
Education
B.A. Oberlin College
M.A. University of Minnesota
Ph.D. University of Minnesota
Publications
BOOKS
Alain Resnais, Interviews (Editor and Introductory essay). University Press of Mississippi "Conversations with Filmmakers" series, 2021.
Bertrand Tavernier, Interviews (Introductory essay; interviews co-edited with T. Jefferson Klline). University Press of Mississippi "Conversations with Filmmakers" series, 2016; pb 2022.
Bertrand Tavernier. Manchester U. Press (U.K.), Palgrave Macmillan (U.S.), 2011; pb 2015.
New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France. U. of Nebraska Press, 1996. Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Modern Language Association Scaglione Prize for best book in French & Francophone Studies, 1997.
Rape and Representation (Contributor, Co-edited with Brenda R. Silver). Columbia U. Press, 1991; pb 1993.
Parables of Theory: Jean Ricardou's Metafiction. Summa Publications, 1984.
ARTICLES
"The 1970s Mode d'Emploi: Three Films by Georges Perec," Yale French Studies #143 (2024), 137-159.
"Alain Resnais, Anti-Illusionist," and "Bertrand Tavernier: 'Un film est comme un repas' ('A film is like a meal)," The Art of Directing: A Concise Dictionary of French Film Directors, Ed. Michael Abecassis et al.. Peter Lang, 2023.
"Hommage à Bertrand Tavernier : du genre filmique au genre," Le Genre & L'Ecran, June 2021. Available at : https://www.genre-ecran.net/?Hommage-a-Bertrand-Tavernier (4,600 words).
"Rereading '93 in '21" [on Victor Hugo]. South Central Review, vol. 38.2-3 (fall 2021), 84-89.
"French and American Feminists Write About #MeToo," South Central Review 37:1 (Spring 2020): 14-28.
"Modiano at the Movies," Yale French Studies #133 (summer 2018), 113-26.
"Becoming a Song: Sound, Memory, and Cinema History in Michael Haneke's Amour," South Central Review 33: 2 (summer 2016): 80-95."
"A La Recherche de témoins: Le 17 Octobre, 1961 et ses représentations," in Mémoires Occupées: Fictions Françaises et Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Marc Dambre, ed., Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013, 207-214.
"Irène Némirovsky's David Golder from Novel to Film and Back," Yale French Studies #121 (2012), 54-68.
"Lieux de mémoire et géographie imaginaire dans Dora Bruder," Cahiers du Centre de Recherche: Etudes sur le roman du second demi-siècle, Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle (2005), 397-405.
"Documentary in an age of Terror," South Central Review 22:2 (2005), 20-38.
"Tavernier's Doubt," Studia Filmoznawcze (Warsaw, Poland), special issue on Film and Religion, spring 2004.
"Women Filmmakers Remember the Occupation" [on Chantal Akerman and Diane Kurys], Modern and Contemporary France (UK), special issue on "Gendering the Occupation," vol. 7, no. 1 (1999).
"The Barbie Affair and the Trials of Memory," in Fascism's Return: Scandal, Revision and Ideology Since 1980, edited by Richard J. Golsan. University of Nebraska Press, 1999
"Pagnol and the Paradoxes of Frenchness," in Identitiy Papers: Scenes of Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France, Tom Conley & Steven Ungar, eds. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Works in Progress
Book: "Adaptation from Darwin to Hitchcock"
"Aurenchébost and the French Cinema Canon" (on the scriptwriting team Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost).
Contact
Departments
Institutes