Timeline of FDH Projects
1401 ... 1474 ... 1792 ... 1950
Making Medieval Poetry
Manuscripts now available in digital form lay the ground for this project exploring the pre-modern poetry book through its many, long lives. Here, for the first time, an ensemble of major and minor French poetry, compiled during the late fourteenth century, and put together again 400 years later. Also accessible here another similar chapbook gathering poems of François Villon, Guillaume de Machaut, Alain Chartier, Christine de Pizan. With our partners, Turin State Archives, & Royal Library of Sweden, we contribute the two digital surrogates to advance research on the medieval anthology and its cultural memory. Seminars, at Duke University and the University of Virginia, pursue this collective effort that began with seminars in 2015 and a workshop in June 2016.
1570 ... 1704
An Early Arabic Library
To attempt to understand the deep relationship existing between the Arab-Muslim world and France, it is important to put together a repertory of materials that was first collected by French archivists and extends all the way back to the fifteenth century. This project begins to reassemble this remarkable early modern Arabic library in digital form. It offers a precise idea of what French scholars knew of the Arab world – a knowledge much deeper than we tend to assume. Digital access to this repertory enables us to enter their library.
1911- 1927
Gustave Lanson's Intellectual Networks
Using the Duke Library electronic catalog record of the Gustave Lanson Collection, the project will identify autographed copies of works sent to Lanson when they were published. Available biographical sources will be used to explore professional intersections among the authors/editors identified as senders of autographed works and Lanson himself. Visualizations of intellectual networks analyzed will be available to the broad public in appropriate online formats.
1938 - 1982
Haitian Ethnopsychiatry
Louis Mars (1905-2000), son of the Haitian founder of Ethnology, Jean Price-Mars, was a pioneer in "Ethnopsychiatry" (globally comparative mental health theorization & systems). This digital library of French-language Haitian "ethnopsychiatric" texts by Mars & his cohort supports renewed partnerships of ethnological engagement with theories of mental health in Haiti, and with a return to afro-diasporic sources in global mental health research and initiatives.
1941
Aimé Césaire and the Digital Cahier
Our objective is two-fold: philological/textual and exegetical. We plan to produce digitized editions of: (1) Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and 2) the selection of short poems in the volume: Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire (Stanford University Press, 1984). “Variorum” editions of these works that will register all the changes that Césaire made to the texts in successive published versions as well as handwritten unpublished mss. Our editions will include English translations and scholarly annotations. We will commence with the publication of Non-Vicious Circle.
1946 - 2014
The Resnais Archipelago
The Resnais Archipelago offers the first wide-range exploration on the cinema and photographic works of French film director Alain Resnais (1922-2014). As a collaborative project with Paris VII and the Cinémathèque Française, it engages a broad theoretical and practical reflection on the nature of filmic and photographic archives and the impact of digitization. The Resnais Archipelago encompasses a series of pedagogical, curatorial, and scholarly outcomes, including virtual exhibitions of students’ works, a video-link workshop, and an international conference.