Faculty
Todd W. Reeser
Associate Professor of French
Director of Graduate Studies in French
Education
PhD, French Studies, University of Michigan (1997)
MA, French Studies, University of Michigan (1992)
BA, Oberlin College (1989)
Office
1328 A Cathedral of Learning
412-624-6258
reeser@pitt.edu
Research Interests & Fields of study
Renaissance Studies; French Renaissance Prose; Montaigne and Rabelais; Gender and Sexuality; Critical and Gender Theory; Masculinities; French Cultural Studies.
Teaching
- French Cultural Studies: "L’Idée de la France" (PDF)
- The French Novel in Translation
- France in the 21st Century
- French Conversation (French through Film)
- Medieval and Renaissance Literature
- Masculinity: Theory, Film, Culture
- Montaigne in Dialogue (graduate)
- Gender and Sexuality in the French Renaissance (graduate)
- Contemporary Perspectives on the French Renaissance (graduate)
- Rabelais (graduate)
- Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (graduate, interdisciplinary course)
- Masculinities in Theory and Practice (graduate, interdisciplinary course)
Selected Publications
Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 288 pp.
“Entre hommes”: French and Francophone Masculinities in Theory and Culture, co-edited with Lewis Seifert (University of Delaware Press, 2008).
"French Masculinities," special issue of Esprit Créateur (Fall 2003), co-edited with Lewis Seifert.
Approaches to Teaching Rabelais's Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Other Works, in development forModern Language Association (MLA) book series “Approaches to Teaching World Literature,” co-edited with Floyd Gray.
Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance (Manuscript in progress)
Masculinities in Theory (Interdisciplinary manuscript in progress, under contract, Blackwell Publishers)
Numerous articles on Renaissance literature/culture, gender studies, critical theory, and French film in journals such as Romanic Review, French Review, Romance Quarterly, French Literature Series, and Exemplaria.
Biographical Profile
Reeser completed his graduate work in French Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1997. After having taught for five years at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, he came to teach at Pittsburgh in Fall 2005.
Reeser’s research interests lie largely in the areas of gender and sexuality broadly conceived, especially in the early modern period, and he is interested in the various intersections between the ancient world, the Renaissance, and modern theoretical concepts.
Reeser’s book Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) proposes a model of masculinity and alterity based on an Aristotelian notion of moderation. In the Renaissance period, masculinity often aligns itself with the virtue of moderation, as it positions its various "others" (e.g. women, the sodomite, the Amerindian) as excess and lack.
In the book, Reeser looks at various French and Latin early modern texts (including Erasmus, Rabelais, Léry, Artus, and Montaigne) in order to study appropriations and subversions of this unstable definition of gender. The book takes a cultural approach, examining a number of discursive contexts such as ethics, pedagogy, friendship, kingship, new-world travel, marriage, and etymology. Showing how gender can function as a ternary system in the Renaissance, the book is also meant to contribute a non-binary way of conceiving of gender to the larger field of gender studies.
Reeser is currently working on two monographs. The first is intended to provide a series of theoretical models for considering the growing field of masculinity studies from a literary/cultural perspective, as inflected by post-structuralist thought. The book synthesizes key approaches already in place and proposes new models. The second book in progress deals with the complicated question of the reception of Platonic sexuality in philosophical and fictional texts of the European Renaissance, from Leonardo Bruni in the early 15th century to Montaigne in the late 16th. Comparative in scope, the manuscript studies how hermeneutics and sexuality do and do not dovetail.
Selected Awards and Honors
Residential fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuttel, Germany, 2008
Various teaching and research grants, U Pittsburgh, 2005-present
NEH Long-term Fellowship, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 2003–04
Short-term Fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago, 2004