Melissa Bailar
Humanities Research Center
Rice University MS-620
6100 Main Street
Houston, TX 77005
713-348-5968
Education
Ph.D. French Studies, Rice University, May 2005
Dissertation: The Mirrored Stage: Representations of the Actress in Nineteenth-Century France and Beyond
B.A. French Studies (magna cum laude), Rice University, May 1997
Employment
Professor in the Practice of Humanities at Rice University, 2011-present
Affiliate Faculty, Department of English (Rice University), 2016-present
Associate Director, Humanities Research Center at Rice University, 2009-present
Americas Researcher in the ‘Our Americas’ Archive Partnership (an Institute of Museum and Library Studies project), 2007-2011
Assistant Director, Humanities Research Center at Rice University, 2006-2008
Lecturer in English and Public Speaking, Université Rennes II, France, 2000-2001
Grants
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “Spatial Humanities Initiative,” $750,000. 2017-2021 [co-PI with PI Farès el-Dahdah]
Doerr Leadership Institute. “Leadership for Healthy Houston Communities,” $12,207. 2017 [co-PI with PI John Mulligan]
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “Resilient Networks to Support Inclusive Digital Humanities,” $500,000. 2016-2019 [co-PI with PI Geneva Henry at George Washington University and others]
American Council of Learned Societies. “Postdoctoral Partnership Initiative,” $69,150. 2016-18 [PI]
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. "Public Humanities @ Rice," $600,000. 2015-18 [co-PI with PI Farès el-Dahdah]
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures: "Platforms of Knowledge in a Wide Web of Worlds: Production, Participation, and Politics," $175,000. 2014-17 [co-PI with PI Farès el-Dahdah and co-PI Lisa Spiro]
Publications
LITERARY STUDIES
“Lipogrammatic Criticism: Inspirations from Georges Perec’s La Disparition,”LMA (Lectures du Monde Anglophone) / PEW (Perspectives on the English-speaking World), Co-Ed. Anne-Laure Tissut and Oriane Montheard. Forthcoming.
“Take 12.” With Philomena Bradford, Aaren Pastor, and Judith Roof. In Reading and Writing Innovative Texts: Critical Innovations. Ed. Robin Silbergleid and Kristina Quynn.London: Palgrave, 2017.
“An Interview with Nicole Brossard.” With Nicole Brossard and Judith Roof. ASAP/Journal 1.2 (2016): 247-259.
“Divining Sarah Bernhardt,” The Divine: Shaw Festival, Summer 2015.
MEDICAL HUMANITIES
“Uncanny Anatomies / Figures of Wax,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Fall 2016.
DIGITAL HUMANITIES
“The Humanities Student as Digital Archivist: Pedagogical Opportunity in the Our Americas Archive Partnership,” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Summer 2011: 80-91.
“Bringing the Americas Together in the Classroom” in Teaching and Studying the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
EDITED COLLECTIONS
Editor, Emerging Disciplines (Rice University Press, 2010).
TRANSLATIONS
Translation of Louis André Dorion, “Genèse et déclin de la question socratique” in The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Peter Schulman, The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2003). Review published in Nineteenth-Century French Studies 40 (Fall 2011): 170.
Review of Mariah Devereux Herbeck, Wandering Women in French Film and Literature: A Study of Narrative Drift. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Review published inStudies in 20th & 21st Century Literature.June, 2017.
Review of Christopher H. Johnson, Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2015). Review published in Journal of Social History. June, 2016.
Review of Alice Yeager Kaplan, Dreaming in French: the Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Review published in South Central Review 30:2 (Fall 2013): 162-164.
Review of Tamar Garb, The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). Review published in Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41 (Fall/Winter 2012/2013): 89.
Review of Leonard R. Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin-de-Siècle. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Review published in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, May 2009.
Review of Renée M. Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Review published in The Journal of Southern History, November 2003.
Awards and Distinctions
Faculty Co-Leader, Chronotopic Imaginaries: The City in Signs, Signals, and Scripts(Rice Seminar), 2016-17
South Central Modern Language Association President (including vice and past president status), 2013-15
South Central Modern Language Association Conference Paper Prize for the best paper in cultural studies presented at their annual conference, 2007
John Gardner Award for Best Dissertation in the Humanities at Rice University, 2005
Service
Cultural Heritage Steering Committee Member (Rice University), 2016-
Medical Humanities Steering Committee Member (Rice University), 2016-
Digital Humanities Working Group Member (Rice University), 2016-
University Committee on the Library Member (Rice University), 2014-15, 2016-
Rice University Texas Medical Center Working Group, 2015-
Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes Humanities Administration Network Member, 2011-
Rice-UTHealth Medical Humanities Retreat Member, 2017
Reviewer, Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal, 2016
University Committee on Benefits Member (Rice University), 2015-16
Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes Humanities Research Focus Group Member, 2015
Rice University Admissions Event Speaker, 2012-2015
Reviewer, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 2015
South Central Modern Language Association Program Committee Chair, 2013
South Central Modern Language Association Book Prize Committee Chair, 2014
University Committee on Admissions Member (Rice University), 2013-15
Search Committee Member, Executive Director of Digital Scholarship Services (Rice University), 2013
South Central Modern Language Association Representative-at-Large, 2010-2012
Presentations
INVITED TALKS
“’The War on Rats:’ (Mis)Representing the Bubonic Plague.” The History and Culture of Disease and Healing Lecture Series, the John P McGovern Museum of Health and Medical Science, October 31, 2017.
“Body Curation: The Eerie Culture/s of Medical Museum.”The History and Culture of Disease and Healing Lecture Series, the John P McGovern Museum of Health and Medical Science, November 29, 2016.
“Variations on George Perec’s Lipogram: The Hyper-Present Absence of the Vowel.”Colloque International, ERIAC Université de Rouen: “Ecritures déliées / Unmoored Languages,” November 2016.
“Cross-, Inter-, Anti-: The Eclipse of Disciplinarity.” South Central Modern Language Association, October 2014.
PERFORMANCES
“Siren Sense: The Synaesthetics of Desire.” Group multi-media performance. ASAP/7: Arts and the Public, September 2015.
Producer, Costume Designer, and Set Designer for Eden Cinema, performed at Rice University in May 2013.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
“(Anti-)Maps as (Anti-) Art.” The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, October 2017.
“The Transparent Cage of Digital Ubiquity: Ersatz Community and Evidence.” American Comparative Literature Association, July 2017.
“Community-Building as Scholarly Production: Ersatz Society, Ersatz Academics.” Ersatzism: A Conference and Workshop on the Cultural Logic of Inauthenticity, May 2017.
“Resuscitating the Humanities: An Intravenous Approach.”The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, February 2016.
“Theater of the Impossible: Marguerite Duras’s Plays on Absence and Absence of Plays.” Midwest Modern Language Association, November 2015.
“Variations on a Coda: Marguerite Duras’s Refinished Endings.”The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, February 2015.
“The Tides of Memory: Accretion and Erosion in Duras and Varda.” The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, October 2014.
“The Waxen Subject: Material Experimentation in Nineteenth-Century France.” American Comparative Literature Association, March 2014.
“Wax Eloquent: The Undead Art of Medical Moulage.” The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, February 2014.
“How does Your Garden Grow?: Benguigui’s and Djebar’s Constructive ‘Third Space.’” South Central Modern Language Association, October 2013.
“The Vanishing Point of the Human: Villiers's and Rachilde's Life-like Automatons.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, October 2013.
“Black and White and Read All Over: Experiencing the Screens of Duras and Brossard.” The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, February 2013.
“La Flâneuse d’Algérie: Assia Djebar’s Reappropriation of the Wandering Gaze.” South Central Modern Language Association Conference, November 2012.
“Rammasser, reflecter, recycler: Salvaged images and sound in Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse.”South Central Modern Language Association Conference, October 2011.
“The Spectrum of “La Divine:” Sarah Bernhardt’s Photographic Performativity.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association Conference, October 2009.
“Setting the Stage for Disorder: Rousseau’s Antitheatrical Sentiment in Revolutionary Times.” South Central Modern Language Association, November 2008.
“Cinécriture feminine: White ink of page and screen.” South Central Modern Language Association Conference, October 2007.
“The Look of Artifice.” South Central Modern Language Association Conference, October 2005.
“Courtesans Acting Out.” Modern Language Association Conference, December 2003.
“Stages of Change: The Comédienne, the Theater, and 19th-century Paris.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, October 2003.
“Nana and the Mirror’s Tain.” 12th AIZEN International Conference on Emile Zola and Naturalism, October 2003.
Courses Taught at Rice University
HURC 306/506: “Health and Humanities Master Class” Fall 2015, 2016, 2017
HURC 602: “Rice Seminar: Chronotopic Imaginaries: The City in Signs, Signals, and Scripts” Fall 2016, Spring 2017
HURC 307: “Critical Humanities of Health and the Body” Spring 2016
HURC 430: “Practicum in Health Humanities” Spring 2015
FWIS 101: “Women Filming Women: French Women Directors 1970 through the Present” Fall 2012, Fall 2014
FWIS 172: “Women of the Night: Courtesans and Performers in 19th-Century French Literature” Fall 2013
HURC 604: “Introduction to Digital Humanities” Fall 2013
Beginning & Intermediate French, 1998-2005
French for Engineers (Summer Study Abroad in Grenoble, France), 2003
Multicultural Communication, 1999-2001
Dissertation Committees
Michael Miller, PhD Dissertation: Literary Databanks: Data Collection and Accounting as Critical Practice in Modernity. [outside reader]
Alanna Beroiza, PhD Dissertation: Out of Sight: Bodies, genders, and Sexes at the Intersection of Media and Biotechnologies. Defense anticipated May 2018. [outside reader]
Seth Morton, PhD Dissertation: New Modernism, New Media: Techne and Poeisis as Critical Aesthetic Practice. Defense anticipated May 2018. [outside reader]
Suzanne Rindell, PhD Dissertation: Borrowed Fashions in Early 20th-Century Literature and Culture. Defense anticipated December 2017. [outside reader]
Laura Richardson, PhD Dissertation: Women's Authorship and the Institution of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, and Djuna Barnes. Defended May 2015. [outside reader]