Stains / Les taches: Modern French Identities

Zoe Angelis is a PhD candidate in the French Department and at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Her doctoral project, entitled «The intersection of literature and reality in the works of Bataille and Blanchot», examines the question of what kind of real is addressed in writing (and how that might differ from more conventional representations of reality), as well as the question of writing's own «being» (that is, the particularity of its mode of being, its peculiar reality/irreality).
Blake Gutt is a postdoctoral scholar with the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. His PhD, completed in 2018 at the University of Cambridge, was entitled «Rhizomes, Parasites, Folds and Trees: Systems of Thought in Medieval French and Catalan Literary Texts». His current project examines representations of gender transition and transformation in medieval European literary texts through the lens of modern transgender theory.