Professor Emerita of French and Comparative Literature
School of Humanities

Affiliate Faculty, Comparative Literature
School of Humanities

Director of UCEAP France 2015-2017

Professor in Residence, June, 2018, University of Lyon École Doctorale: http://3la.univ-lyon2.fr/spip.php?article128

Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation 2019-2022

Invited Researcher, University of Grenoble, Centre National Chorégraphique de Grenoble, November 2021

Mercator Fellow, University of Bonn, Germany, Spring 2023

Invited Professor, University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, January 2024

Twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, avant-garde, poetry & poetics, critical theory, dance and performance studies, phenomenology

Agency and Embodiment

Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement

Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary (University of Chicago Press, 2019)

I am honored to have received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities; the Camargo Foundation; the American Philosophical Society; the American Council of Learned Societies; the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; and the Clark Art Institute/Oakley Center.

I began my career as a scholar of 19th- and 20th- century French poetry, with a theoretical interest in the relation between technological advance/historical change and forms of poetic expression. Over time, I have turned increasingly toward performance genres--performance poetry first, then dance. While remaining grounded in Frankfurt School Theory, I have developed a strong interest in phenomenology and theories of embodiment. I have written two books that focus on experimental writing and two books that trace how experiment occurs in the domains of everyday gesture and the performance arts. While "experiment" is a slippery term, I continue to believe that it applies to artists who press harder against the conventions of a single discipline or medium. A particular area of study that has fascinated me from the start is the relation between forms of artistic expression and political or social impact. Accordingly, in my teaching as well as my research I always situate literary and artistic works in their historical contexts: for instance, the novel and the rise of a consumer society in 19th-century France; poetry and the blossoming of technology at the beginning of the 20th; Francophone Caribbean writing and the crisis of colonialism in the 1960s. A recent undergraduate course centered on the city of Paris as a crucible of artistic invention against a backdrop of revolution, war, and social change. During the past two years I have developed a course on Black Internationalism and another on Dramas of the Diaspora. But I have also enjoyed working with undergraduates on the genre of the Memoir, the contemporary novel, and the practice of translation.

My graduate seminars have tended to focus on writers and theorists who have helped shape our understanding of the relationship between art and politics, such as Marx, Rimbaud, Césaire, Bataille, Adorno, Fanon, and Rancière. I recently taught a course on the sense of touch, "At Hand," in which we read texts by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and another on "Wildness and Phenomenology" with texts that interweave ecocritical, posthumanist, and phenomenological perspectives. A few years ago in France, I offered a "Practicum on the Avant-Garde" in which we put into practice the compositional methods and ideas of Artaud, Duchamp, Cage, Pina Bausch, and the performance artist William Pope.L.

Best Book Award 2020, ATHE (Association of Theater in Higher Education)

Jackson Mac Low: Between Writing and Performance, co-edited with Tyrus Miller and reprint of Jackson Mac Low, The Pronouns--A Collection of 40 Dances for the Dancers, with Afterword by Carrie Noland, "A Performance History of The Pronouns (Slought Foundation, 2023).

"Phenomenology and Its Phantoms: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Leiris" in French Cultural Studies (Nov. 21, 2023)

"Reverberating Violence, Visibility, and the Dance of Rachid Ouramdane" in View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, no. 36 (Fall, 2023)

"Adventures with Husserl" in Arcade: Literature, Humanities & the World (Stanford, October 2021): https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/user/carrie-noland
"Reacting to Orange Hair" in Jackson Mac Low: Between Writing and Performance, eds. Carrie Noland and Tyrus Miller (forthcoming 2023) and "Afterward: A Performance History"

“Like-Sensing Subjects: Husserl and Dance” in Midwestern Studies in Philosophy, XLIV (2019).

"Merce Cunningham: Corps à corps avec l'écrit" in Revue française des études américaines (Spring, 2018).

"Ethics, Staged" in The Ethics of Gesture, special issue of Performance Philosophy, ed. Lucia Ruprecht, vol. 3:1 (spring, 2017).

"Bound and Unbound: Reconstructing Merce Cunningham's Crises (1960)" in The Oxford Handbook of Dance Reenactment, ed. Mark Franko (Oxford University Press, 2016).

"Césaire, Chamoiseau, and the Work of Legacy" in Small Axe: Journal of Caribbean culture, Spring 2016

"French Poetic Experimentation," in The Cambridge Companion to French Literature, ed. John Lyons (Cambridge UP, 2016)

"Inheriting the Avant-Garde: Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, and the Legacy Plan" in Dance Research Journal (Summer 2013)

"Embodiment" and "Merce Cunningham" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics" (2014)

"Poetry and Technology," Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (revised edition, 2012)

"Edouard Glissant: A Poetics of the 'Entour'" in Poetry and Cultural Studies (Iowa UP, 2011).

"The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression" in Dance Research Journal (2010)

"Poésie et typosphère chez Léon-Gontran Damas" in Poésies et Médias du XXe siecle (Nouveau Monde, 2010)

"Red Front/Black Front: Aimé Césaire and the Affaire Aragon" in Diacritics (Fall 2007)

"Motor Intentionality: Gestural Meaning in Bill Viola and Merleau-Ponty" in Postmodern Cultures (Fall 2007)

"Miming Signing: Henri Michaux and the Writing Body" in Migrations of Gesture, eds. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness. University of Minnesota Press (2008).

"Digital Gestures" in New Media Poetries, eds. Thomas Swiss and Adalaide Morris. MIT Press (2006).

"Phonic Matters: French Sound Poetry, Julia Kristeva, and Bernard Heidsieck" in PMLA, Special Issue on Poetry (January 2005)

"Bataille Looking" in Modernism/Modernity, (March, 2004).

"Le Graffiti, la ligne, et la lettre chez René Char" in Pleine marge, (no. 35, June 2002).

"The Metaphysics of Coffee," in Modernism/Modernity, (Fall 2000).

"High Decoration: Blaise Cendrars, Sonia Delaunay, and the Poem as Fashion Design," in Journal X, (Spring 1998).

"Poetry at Stake; Blaise Cendrars, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Poetry in the Literature Classroom," in PMLA, (January 1997).

"Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance," in Critical Inquiry, (Spring 1995).

Merce Cunningham, After the Arbitrary (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Winner of the Best Book Award for 2020, Association for Theater in Higher Education

Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology" (Princeton University Press, 1999).

"Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture" (Harvard University Press, 2009)

"Migrations of Gesture" (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), co-edited with Sally Ann Ness.

"Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement" co-edited with Barrett Watten (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

NEH (1995); Camargo Foundation (2004); American Philosophical Society (2005); ACLS (2010-2011)

Guggenheim Fellowship, 2014-2015 Clark Art Institute/Oakley Center Humanities Fellowship 2014-2015

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2770

Last updated
02/05/2024