University of Southern California
USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences  

faculty

Antonia Szabari

Associate Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature

Contact Information
E-mail: szabari@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 740-4940
Office: UUC 217

LINKS
Curriculum Vitae
 

Education

  • Ph.D. , Johns Hopkins University, 2005

Academic Appointment, Affiliation, and Employment History

  • Associate Professor, University of Southern California, 05/13/2010-  
  • Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, 08/15/2004-05/13/2010  

Description of Research

Summary Statement of Research Interests
My research focuses on early modern French literature and, in a broader fashion, on the culture of early modern Europe. I believe that the study of the early modern period is akin to anthropological research in which one interprets signs of another culture while relying on and reshaping one's own conceptual tools. My study of French religious and political satire entitled "Less Rightly Said: Readers and Scandals in Sixteenth-Century France" was published by Stanford University Press in 2009. "Less Rightly Said" shows that pamphlets helped to transform the theological and dogmatic function of religion in the sixteenth century into a way of constructing, seeing, and inhabiting a world of differences.Thanks to techniques that produced changes in reading and the increase of the availability and significance of the printed book, and thanks to the virulence of polemics and satire, pamphlets contributed most strongly to the development in the sixteenth century of what the linguist George Lakoff calls in a contemporary context the “political mind.” I am currently at work (together with Natania Meeker) on an edited volume tentatively entitled "The Spiritual Life of Plants." Taking a long view over the early modern period and into the Enlightenment, this collection will assess what role plants have played in shaping the emergent humanities. My current book project "Feathers of the Phoenix" examines the mediating role played by material objects in cross-cultural communication between the early modern Ottomans and French. Other projects underway include a book-length study on the religious culture of the European Reformation under Ottoman rule (especially in Hungary) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I teach undergraduate classes on French Renaissance literature, travel literature, cartography, zoology, and botany. My graduate teaching focuses on conceptions of the animal, both in a modern and in an early modern context, and on non-theological, discursive forms of religious culture, especially as they contribute to the formation of "publicness" or the diversification of early modern societies (converging around problems such as religious satire, mystical "modus loquendi," and Bible translations into the vernacular) and Orientalism and its critiques in French literature. I have been the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the DAAD.
Research Keywords
Early modern French Literature, the culture of reading, injurious speech and publicity, the literature of travel, religion as discourse, and the plant / animal / human boundary in early modern culture.

Conferences and Other Presentations

Conference Presentations
  • "Disposable Subjects: Huguenots and Turks in Sixteenth-Century France", Renaissance Society of America, Talk/Oral Presentation, Montreal, Canada, Spring 2011   
  • "La virilité à l’épreuve du voyage: les voyageurs français dans l’empire ottoman au XVIe siècle", Invited lecture at the Institut français, Universität Basel, Talk/Oral Presentation, Basel, Switzerland, Invited, Spring 2011   
  • "Tragic Orient", Sixteenth Century Society, Talk/Oral Presentation, Montreal, Canada, Fall 2010   
  • ""The Lust of Seeing: The Turkish "Navigations and Peregrinations" of Nicolas de Nicolay", Talk/Oral Presentation, Istanbul, Bogazici University, Invited, 2007-2008   
  • "A becsmérlés paradoxona a tizenhatodik-századi francia röpiratokban", Talk/Oral Presentation, ELTE, The Renaissance Seminar, Budapest, Invited, 2007-2008   
  • "Paradoxical Vituperation: The Rhetoric of Verbal Offense in Early Modern France", Talk/Oral Presentation, Brown University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, Invited, 2007-2008   
  • "Geographies of the Unkind Imagination in the Polemical Literature of the French Reformation", Talk/Oral Presentation, Humanities Center, Harvard University, February 15, 2007, Dept. of Romance Languages, Harvard University, Invited, 2006-2007   

Publications

Book
  • Szabari, A. (2009). Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France. Stanford University Press.
Book Chapter
  • Szabari, A. (2011). "Malaise in Music: French Hip Hop on Trial" in "Paul and the Philosophers". Fordham University Press.
  • Szabari, A. (2009). "‘La Plume de fer’: vers une esthétique de l'impact chez Ronsard" in Ronsard poète militant: Les Discours des Misères de ce temps. pp. 92-108. Paris.
  • Szabari, A. (2006). The Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech. pp. 122-136. New York: Political Theologies/Fordham University Press.
  • Szabari, A. (2002). Le faisible qui ne se fait pas: la fantaisie évangélique de l'écriture chez Honorat Rambaud. pp. p. 183-207. Lyon: Lyon et L'illustration de la langue française à la Renaissance/Presses de L'ENS.
Book Review
  • Szabari, A. (2010). Jean-Baptiste Trento and Pierre Eskrich. Mappe Monde Nouvelle Papistique: Histoire de la Mappe-Monde Papistique, en laquelle est déclaré tout ce qui est contenu et pourtraict en la grande table, ou carte de la mappe-monde (Genève, 1566). Renaissance Quarterly. pp. 1340-1342.
  • Szabari, A. (2008). Christian Belin, ed. La méditation au XVIIe siècle: Rhétorique, art, spiritualité. Renaissance Quarterly.
Journal Article
  • Szabari, A., Meeker, N. (2012). From the Century of the Pods to the Century of the Plants: Plant Horror, Politics, and Vegetal Ontology. Discourse. Vol. 34 (1)
  • Szabari, A. (2012). "Strawberries on Life Support." L.A. Review of Books (January, 2012). Review of Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) and Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • Szabari, A. (2008). The Way of Imperfection: Laughter and Mysticism in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron. French Forum. Vol. 33 (3), pp. 1-16.
  • Szabari, A. (2005). Rabelais Parrhesiastes: The Rhetoric of Insult and Rabelais's Cynical Mask. Modern Langauge Notes/Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. p. S84-123.
  • Szabari, A. (2001). parler seulement de moi: The Disposition of the Subject in Montaigne's Essay 'De l'art de conferer'. Modern Langauge Notes/Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. p. 1001-1024.


Honors and Awards

  • Provost's Fellowship for Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, USC, 2010-2011   
  • Huntington Library Research Fellowship Recipient, USC-Huntington, EMSI faculty fellowship, Spring 2011   
  • USC-Huntington EMSI Faculty Fellowship, Spring 2011   
  • Radcliffe Institute, Fellow, 2006-2007  
  • USC Innovative Teaching Award, Awarded for the development of course on secularization and secularism in France and the US , 2006-2007   
  • USC Zumberge Research and Innovation Fund Award, Individual Research Grant, 2005-2006   

Service to the University

Administrative Appointments
  • Director of Graduate Studies, French, 2012-2013   

Service to the Profession

Conferences Organized
  • organizer, Portraits of the Traveler, Huntington Library , Spring 2012   
  • organizer, Modern Language Association, Annual Conference, Philadelphia, Organizer of panel "Making Publics in Early Modern France", Fall 2009   
  • co-organizer, The Spiritual Life of Plants, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, 2008-2009   
  • organizer, respondent, The Memory of Religious Troubles in Sixteenth-Century France, Renaissance Society of America, panel, 2007-2008   
Professional Memberships
  • Sixteenth-Century Studies, 2010-2011  
  • Renaissance Society of America, 2006-2011  
  • Modern Language Association, 2002-2011  


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