DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Matthieu Dupas is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian. After obtaining the Agrégation in Classics, he received a PhD in French Literature from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle (2015) and from the University of Michigan (2016). His teaching and research focus on gender and sexuality in early modern and contemporary French literature and culture.

His first monograph, La Galanterie comme mode de vie: Amour, civilité et mariage dans Mélite ou les Fausses lettres de Pierre Corneille was published by Classiques Garnier in 2023, in the series “Masculin/feminin dans l’Europe Moderne.” The book examines gallantry as a way of life cultivated by the elites of Ancien Régime France and as one of the principal forms through which relations between men and women were organized within the emerging civil sphere. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s history of the subject of desire, it argues that gallantry constituted a distinctive historical apparatus that transformed individuals into desiring subjects linked by love, civility, and mutual recognition. Neither reducible to the Christian economy of the “flesh” nor yet organized by the categories of modern “sexuality,” gallantry emerges as an intermediate configuration through which desire became a privileged medium of subject formation. Through a reading of Pierre Corneille’s early comedies, the book reconstructs this forgotten moment in the history of gender, desire, and erotic life.

His current book project focuses on Neo-Classical literature and investigates how Racine, Molière, and Madame de Lafayette, in the 1660s, helped articulate an authentic culture of love in which desire functioned as a source of truth for the self and a mode of subjectivation. He also works on autofiction, queer theory, and the changing representations of gender and sexuality in contemporary literature.

At Northwestern, he has taught courses such as “The Powers of Literature: From Sovereignty to Governmentality in Seventh-Century Fiction and Drama,” “Beyond French Feminism: Theorizing Gender and Sexuality in France from Beauvoir to Preciado,” The Construction of Gender and Sexuality.”

Selected publications:

• Saynète n^o 19 : “M. Dupas/Euripide,” Rédaction du Mouvement Transitions, July 6, 2024.
• La Galanterie comme mode de vie. Amour, civilité et mariage dans Mélite ou les Fausses lettres de Pierre Corneille, Paris, Classiques Garnier, « Masculin/féminin dans l’Europe Modern », 2023.
• “Gallantry and Matrimonial Heterosexuality: Love, and Friendship in Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre (1654),” Exemplaria 32.2 (2020): 130-144.
• “Lesbianism in Benserade’s Iphis et Iante (1634): Gallantry and the Making of Heterosexuality in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Ovidian Transversions:“Iphis and Ianthe,” 1350-1650, co-edited by Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken, University of Edinburgh Press, 2019, pp. 241-260.
• “La sodomie dans l’affaire Théophile de Viau: questions de genre et de sexualité dans la France du premier xviie siècle. ” Les Dossiers du Grihl, vol. 4, 2010.