Katharine Conley

Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Arts and Humanities
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1992
6045 Wentworth Hall, Room 208

Kate.Conley@Dartmouth.edu
(603) 646-2015

Primary Interests

Surrealism, women in Surrealism, poetry, 20th-century fiction by women, Quebec women writers, feminist and avant-garde theories of writing.

Select Courses

French 10, 20, 25, 45, 60, 80; Comp Lit 10, 61; Women's Studies 7

Selected Publications

• A Swimmer Between Two Worlds: Francesca Woodman's Maps of Interior Space.  Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 2.2 (2008)
• Safe as Houses: Anamorphic Bodies in Ordinary Spaces: Miller, Carrington, Tanning, and Woodman."  In Angels of Anarchy: Woman Surrealist Artists and Tradition.  Ed. Patricia Allmer. Forthcoming with Prestel, 2009
• "When the Viewer's Gaze is Returned: Teaching Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon."  Teaching Ethics.  Forthcoming 2009-10
• "Rrose Sélavy's Ghosts: Life, Death, and Desnos."  French Review.  Forthcoming April 2010

Additional Information

Professor Conley’s research and teaching focuses on surrealism as the premier avant-garde movement of the twentieth century.  She has published books and articles on women and the surrealist movement, on the poet Robert Desnos as the founding figure upon whom surrealist practice was founded—a poet whose surrealist idealism helped him in his work on the radio in the 1930s and in the French Resistance up through his deportation and death in a newly liberated concentration camp in 1945—and on the links between surrealist poetry and painting and surrealism and outsider art.  She is also the author of essays in museum exhibition catalogues.  She teaches courses in the Department of French and Italian and in the Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies Programs on surrealism, women in surrealism, modernism and anthropology, primitivism and outsider art, and on surrealism and photography.  Her current research project explores ghostliness in surrealist thought, film, photography, painting, sculpture, and writing.