Anne Vila
Credentials: PhD, Johns Hopkins
Position title: Professor of French
Email: acvila@wisc.edu
Phone: 262-5075
Address:
638 Van Hise Hall
Specialties:
Eighteenth-century French literature and culture.
Areas of research interest: my research unfolds at the intersection of the French Enlightenment and the Medical Humanities. Having begun my career by investigating the intellectual and cultural history of sensibility, I continue to be fascinated by historical constructs of the mind/body relation and altered psychic states. I am equally interested in the conceptual transfers or cross-fertilizations that occurred between biomedical discourse, literary production, and moral/social philosophy during and after the Enlightenment era. My current book project is”The Culture of Convulsions in France, 1700 to 1900.”
Major Administrative Positions within Department of French and Italian:
Chair, Department of French and Italian, August 2008-June 2011
Associate Chair for French, Department of French and Italian, 2004-2006 and 2012-2013
Director of Graduate Studies for French MA/Ph.D. programs, 2014-2016
Graduate Advisor, French MA/Ph.D. program
HONORS & GRANTS
Pickard-Bascom Professor of French, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2016-2021
Visiting International Fellow of UK Society for French Studies, May-June 2017
Vilas Associate Award (research support), University of Wisconsin, 1999-2001
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, 1997-98
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
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Reedition of Samuel-Auguste Tissot, De la santé des gens de lettres, 2018
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Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Englightenment France, 2018
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A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, 2014
EDITED VOLUMES
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De la santé des gens de lettres, 2018
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L’Esprit (dé)réglé: Literature, Sciences de l’homme, and the Life of the Mind in France, 1700-1900, 2017
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Entre le corps et l’esprit: langages et savoirs concurrents, 2017
ARTICLES
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“Malade de son génie”: raconter les pathologies des gens de lettres, de Tissot à Balzac , 2015
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Going Cataleptic: Ecstatic Extremes and ‘Deep’ Thinking in and around Diderot, 2014
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Penseurs profonds: Sensibility and the Knowledge-Seeker in Eighteenth-Century France, 2013
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Finer’ Feelings: Socialbility, Sensibility, and the Emotions of gen de lettres in Eighteenth-Century France, 2012
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The Scholar at Work: Habitus and the Identity of the “Learned” in Eighteenth-Century France, 2012
BOOK CHAPTERS
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Powers, Pleasures, and Perils of the Senses in the Enlightenment Era, 2014
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Medicine and the Body in the French Englightenment, 2014
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De la pathologie à l’extase ‘poétique’: la catalepsie entre médecine et littérature (XVIIIe siècle), 2014
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Le sublime, le grotesque, et l’animal dans les théories esthétiques de Diderot, 2014
