Lawrence Kritzman
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Lawrence D. Kritzman, an American scholar, is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in Humanities and Professor of French, Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He has written works on, edited works on, or given lectures on Foucault, Kristeva, Sartre, Camus, Derrida, Montaigne, and others, focusing especially on twentieth-century French philosophy. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, he has innovated sixteenth century French studies in his readings of Marguerite de Navarre, Sceve, Ronsard, Rabelais, Montaigne, and the poètes rhetoriquers.
His books include Destruction/Decouverte: le fonctionnement de la rhetorique dans les Essais de Montaigne, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance, and The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays. He has edited Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity; Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture; Le Signe et le texte; Sans aultre guide; Auscwitz and After: Race, Culture and the Jewish Question in France; and Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory.
As editor of European Perspectives, a series in social philosophy and cultural criticism from Columbia University Press, he has published authors such as Adorno, Baumann, Bourdieu, Cixous, Deleuze, Derrida, Ginzburg, Kristeva, and Vattimo. His most recent editorial venture, the Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought, was the winner of the 2006 Modern Language Association Scalgione prize for best book in French. Kritzman has also penned articles for Le Monde, and has been interviewed on Radio France.
In 1990, the French government made him a knight in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques; in 1994, he was made an officer. In 2000, he was awarded the Ordre National du Mérite, the second-highest civilian award accorded in France, by Jacques Chirac. Kritzman is founder and director of the Institute of French Cultural Studies. The major goal of the Institute of French Cultural Studies is to allow advanced graduate students and assistant professors in French to partake in contemporary cultural debates on both sides of the Atlantic and to prepare them to supplement the programmatic needs of French departments in developing courses in interdisciplinary studies taught in French. He also heads the Institute for European Studies at Dartmouth. In the past, he has taught at Rutgers, Stanford, Harvard, and Michigan.
Kritzman received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A. from Middlebury College, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
