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
- Spring 2025 Office Hours
- Fridays 12:00-1:00 pm and 2:20-3:20 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
Books
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Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel (Liverpool University Press, 2019)
Articles
- “Ditch Dwellers: Landscapes of Extinction in Beckett and Volodine.” New Literary History 55.2 (2024). 223-244.
- “Two Solitudes: Houellebecq and Haenel.” Romanic Review. (Forthcoming in issue on “Prophètes de malheur,” 2024).
- “Psychogeography.” Cambridge Critical Concepts: Space and Literature. Ed. Elizabeth F. Evans. (Forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2024).
- “Expand.” Romanic Review 114.3 (Dec. 2023). 457-463.
- “Against the Airport and Its World: The ZAD and Frontiers.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 25.1 (2021, part I of double issue on “Frontiers of Ecocriticism”). 95-105.
- “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.)
- “Spatial Stream of Consciousness.” SubStance 48.1 (2019). 5-25.
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“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.
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“Annie Ernaux and Sophie Calle: Agency and the Ambient Language of Everyday Life.” French Review 90.4. 132-144, 2017
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“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, Emmanuelle. Cambridge Scholars, 2016. 332-339, 2016
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“Empiritexts: Mapping Attention and Invention in Post-1980 French Literature.” French Forum 40.1. 93-108, 2015
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“Everyday Ekphrastic Excursions: Olivier Rolin and Jean-Christophe Bailly.” Romance Studies, 33.3-4. 285-295, 2015
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“Writer, Window, World: Jean Rolin’s Perishing Panoramas and François Bon’s Fleeting Frame.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 17:4. 462-471, 2013
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“The Glorified Woman: Abstraction and Domination in “Le Livre du Voir-dit.” Romanic Review 102:1-2. 91-108, 2011
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“Solving the Massacre of October 17, 1961: History and the Exigencies of Genre Fiction in “Meurtres pour mémoire.” Romance Review 5:19. 4-15, 2009