Philippe Baillargeon

Philippe Baillargeon received a BA and MA from McGill University and a MA and PhD from Princeton University. His teaching and research interests include the literature and culture of the Renaissance and the early seventeenth century, in particular Erasmus, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de L’Estoile, Béroalde de Verville, rhetoric, poetics, the history of ideas and Bakhtinian dialogism. He also regularly teaches courses on Québec literature and culture, especially on questions of identity in poetry and theater. His publications include a bibliography on Ambroise Paré and Renaissance medicine, articles on Le Moyen de parvenir and Erasmus' Praise of Folly, and on Rabelais' Tiers Livre and a forthcoming article on biblical paraphrases in Béroalde de Verville's works. In addition to his other responsibilities, Baillargeon is the founding director of the official testing center at UMass Amherst for the “Test de connaissance du français,” (TCF) the French government-sanctioned exam for assessing language skills for personal, academic or professional reasons. He is also the director of the UMass Oxford Summer Seminar, one of the oldest American summer programs at Oxford University.

Publications

• “Les « permutations » de la folie dans le Tiers Livre”, in Diane Desrosiers, Claude La Charité, Christian Veilleux, Tristan Vigliano (eds.), Rabelais et l'hybridité des récits rabelaisiens « Études rabelaisiennes LVI », Genève, Librairie Droz, 2017, 459-471.
• “De Dame Folie à Madame Sapience. Stratégies rhétoriques de la satire « morosophique » de l'Éloge de la folie au Moyen de parvenir”, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 33.1, winter 2015, 1-33.
• Diane Desrosiers, Philippe Baillargeon, Julie Leclair et Happy Blitt, «Bibliographie», in E. Berriot-Salvadore (ed.), Ambroise Paré (1510-1590). Pratique et écriture de la science à la Renaissance, Paris, Champion, 2003, 399-442.

Courses Recently Taught

• French 289: Paris Through the Centuries
• French 350: French Film
• French 386: French Civilization from the Origins to 1945
• French 424: Renaissance Prose
• French 427: Renaissance Poetry
• French 584: French-Canadian Literature
• French 597LM: Late Medieval and Renaissance Storytellers
• French 627: Renaissance Poetry
• French 670: Expository Prose
• French 728: La Pléiade and l'École de Lyon