Eva Valenta

Eva Valenta received a DEA (Diplôme d’études approfondies) from Université de Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint Denis and her PhD from Cornell University. Her areas of teaching and research interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and culture, French and Central European intellectual history, the evolution of post-communist societies, autobiography, the récit d’enfance, French women writers, film studies, translation, multi-lingualism, and Czech literature, history and culture. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled Doubled Selves and Fractured Childhoods: A Study of the Récit d'Enfance in N. Sarraute, A. Kristof and C. Esteban, examined how writing from a bilingual, bicultural perspective intersects with the récit d'enfance to explore questions of origin, mother tongue, cultural identity and alienation, as well as the unstable boundaries between autobiography and fiction. An earlier research project, L’Espace autobiographique chez Simone de Beauvoir, was notable in particular for its inclusion of a lengthy interview she conducted with Simone de Beauvoir, which explored de Beauvoir’s autobiographical works and her thoughts on the evolution of modern French literature. Valenta has expertise as well in French language pedagogy, and she regularly teaches courses in advanced French language, writing and literary analysis, in addition to courses on a variety of topics in modern French and francophone literature, culture and society.