Department of French & Italian
College of Letters & Science

Joshua Armstrong

Credentials: PhD, University of Virginia

Position title: Associate Professor of French

Email: jtarmstrong@wisc.edu

Phone: 262-5816

Address:
670 Van Hise Hall

Fall 2025 Office Hours
Mondays 12:15-1:15 pm and Wednesdays 1:00-2:00 pm

Primary Language

French

Specialties and Areas of Research Interest

20th– and 21st-century French literature, theory, and culture; urban studies and cartographic theory; geocriticism and ecocriticism.

Selected Publications

Monograph

  • Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel. Liverpool University Press (May 2019).

Articles and Contributions to Edited Volumes

  • “Psychogeography.” Cambridge Critical Concepts: Space and Literary Studies, Ed. Elizabeth F. Evans. Cambridge UP, 2025. 234-248.
  • “Ditch Dwellers: Landscapes of Extinction in Beckett and Volodine.” New Literary History2 (Spring 2024). 223-244. (P)
  • “Two Solitudes: Houellebecq and Haenel.” Romanic Review2 (September 2024, special issue on theme of “Prophets of Doom.”) 404-424. (P)
  • “Expand.” Romanic Review3 (December 2023). 457-463. (Invited contribution for issue on “What should we be doing in French and Francophone Studies.”)
  • “Against the Airport and Its World: The ZAD and Frontiers.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies1 (2021). 95-105. (Invited contribution for double issue on “Frontiers of Ecocriticism.”) (P)
  • “Fine Lines: Jacques Réda’s Poetics of Place.” Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine 18 (2019). 143-154. (Issue 18, Littératures de terrain, edited by Alison James and Dominique Viart.) (P)
  • “French Edgeland Poetics: Topography and Ecology in Jean Rolin’s Les Événements.” France in Flux: Topography, Territory and Contemporary Culture. Eds Blatt, Ari J. and Edward Welch. Liverpool UP, 2019. 161-185.
  • “Spatial Stream of Consciousness.” SubStance1 (2019). 5-25. (P)
  • “Annie Ernaux and Sophie Calle: Agency and the Ambient Language of Everyday Life.” French Review4 (May 2017). 132-144. (P)
  • “Everyday Ekphrastic Excursions: Olivier Rolin and Jean-Christophe Bailly.” Romance Studies3-4 (Nov. 2015). 285-295. (P)
  • “French Psychogeography Today?: The Case of Thomas Clerc’s Paris, musée du XXIe siècle, le dixième arrondissement.” Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space Throughout History. Ed. Peraldo. Cambridge Scholars, 2016. 322-339. (This edited volume published selections from the Colloque International Institut d’Études Transtextuelles et Transculturelles: Littérature et Géographie, L’écriture de l’espace à travers les âges. March 12-13, 2015. Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Lyon, France. It includes an introduction by Robert T. Tally Jr., the eminent geocriticism scholar in the U.S.)
  • “Empiritexts: Mapping Attention and Invention in Post-1980 French Literature.” French Forum1 (Winter 2015). 93-108. (P)
  • “Writer, Window, World: Jean Rolin’s Perishing Panoramas and François Bon’s Fleeting Frame.” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 17:4 (Sept. 2013). 462-471. (P)
  • “The Glorified Woman: Abstraction and Domination in Le Livre du Voir-dit.” Romanic Review 102:1-2 (Jan.-March 2011). 91-108. (P)
  • “Solving the Massacre of October 17, 1961: History and the Exigencies of Genre Fiction in Meurtres pour mémoire.” Romance Review 5:19 (2009): 4-15. (Journal published by the Boston College Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, published selections from their 2009 grad conference.)

Work in Progress

  • “The Communicable Human: Kafka, NDiaye, Beckett, Volodine.” Monograph in progress (expected completion 2027).