Scott M. Sanders
Associate Professor of French
My research investigates British and Caribbean influences on French performance culture. My first book, Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature, won the 2021 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. An interdisciplinary and transnational study of the voice, this book interrogates the philosophical and literary works of well-known and lesser-known French and British writers – including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, Denis Diderot, François Baculard d'Arnaud and Jacques Cazotte, and explores how their texts theorize, represent and construct three inter-related vocal types: the sentimental, the vitalist and the uncanny. These vocal types are connected insofar as the conception of sentimental and vitalist voices – anchored to a physiological understanding of vocal organs–paradoxically led to the development of a disembodied, uncanny voice.
Contact
Department(s)
French and Italian
Education
- B.M. Indiana University
- M.A. New York University
- Ph.D. New York University
Selected Publications
Book
Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature, University of Virginia Press, (April 2022). Walker Cowen Memorial Prize.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
"Between Novels and Songs: Eliza Haywood's French Romance," Studies in the Novel, 54, no. 3 (Summer 2022), 139-158.
Works In Progress
In Nature's Darkness: The Black Atlantic on French Stages. (Book in progress)