François Proulx

My current research investigates Marcel Proust’s use of private codes and allusions in his manuscripts, letters, and drawings. I recently published (with Caroline Szylowicz) the first comprehensive inventory of Proust's drawings to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, documenting over 180 sketches (Bulletin d'informations proustiennes, 2022). Other articles related to Proust's drawings and letters have appared in Modern Language Notes (Fall 2018), Bulletin Marcel Proust (2019, 2021 and 2023), Bulletin d'informations proustiennes (2019, 2020 and 2021), and Nineteenth-Century French Studies (2020).

In Fall 2022, for the centenary of Marcel Proust's death, I co-edited "Proust to Other Ends" (with Hannah Freed-Thall), a special issue of L'Esprit Créateur. I also contributed four entries to the exhibition catalogue Proust, la fabrique de l'oeuvre (Gallimard / Bibliothèque nationale de France).

Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France (University of Toronto Press, 2019) shows how, in a cultural context of perceived national decline and contentious educational reforms, the adolescent male reader became a subject of grave social concern in late-nineteenth-century France. This research project was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The book was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2020 by Choice Reviews (Association of College and Research Libraries) and the chapter "Bourget, the Chambige Affair, and the Queer Seductions of the Novel" received the 2020 HRI Faculty Prize for Research in the Humanities. A webinar presenting the book is available on H-France Salon.

Victims of the Book has been praised as "intelligent, timely, and groundbreaking" (Choice); "ambitious and thought-provoking ... one of Proulx's great strengths is his ability to tell a historicist, contextualist story through sustained and sensitive close readings" (French Studies); "a thorough, scholarly work grounded in research that extends well beyond even the margins of the canon and pays rewardingly close attention to texts" (French Forum); "a refreshingly successful example of literary analysis that addresses both critical and historiographical concerns" (H-France Review).

I am Associate Editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, as well as a member of the editorial boards of Bulletin d'informations proustiennes and Bulletin Marcel Proust. I am also an affiliate of the Proust research team (Équipe Proust) at ITEM, the Institute for Modern Texts and Manuscripts, Paris (Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes, CNRS/ENS).

I am co-director, with Caroline Szylowicz, of the U.S. team for Corr-Proust, the new digital edition of Marcel Proust's correspondence, an ongoing international research collaboration.