Scott M. Sanders
Assistant Professor of French
Assistant Professor of French
I am an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian. My research investigates transoceanic, transnational influences on French performance culture.
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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, in press at the University of Virginia Press, 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.
My research has since shifted toward transatlantic influences on French theater. My second book project, entitled In Nature’s Darkness: The Black Atlantic on French Stages, investigates the influence of the Black Atlantic on eighteenth-century French theater, especially in theatrical works produced across the naval admiralties in Metropolitan France, including the slave trading ports Bordeaux and Nantes.
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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, in press (Spring 2022). Walker Cowen Memorial Prize.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Code Noir in Marivaux’s Theater,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 32, no. 2 (2020): 8576 words.
“On Chanting, Wailing, and Spell-Casting: Haunting Voices in Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable Amoureux,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. 57, no. 4 (2016): 469-90.
“Multimedia in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology, 2 (June 2015) 29-32.
“Sound and Sensibility in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau,” Music & Letters. 94 (May 2013): 237-62.
“Flying the Colonial Skies during the French Enlightenment,” in Rediscovering French Science-Fiction: In Literature, Film and Comics, From Cyrano to Barbarella. Edited by Philippe Mather and Sylvain Rhéault, 41-64. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
Reviews
“Ellen R. Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,” H-France Forum12, no. 3 (May 2017): 1–6.
Review of Denis Diderot, Ed. Marian Hobson, Tr. Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman, Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew: A Multi-Media Edition, Eighteenth Century Music. 13:1 (March 2016): 130-32.
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Works in progress
In Nature’s Darkness: The Black Atlantic on French Stages. (Book in progress)