“Jean Wahl and the Literary Modernist Resistance”
Professional Background
Dr. Lauren Du Graf holds a PhD in English and comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a member of the Royster Society of Fellows. As the Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow, at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Du Graf will be conducting research for her project “Jean Wahl and the Literary Modernist Resistance.”
Dr. Du Graf is fluent in English and French and proficient in German and Spanish. She also has reading skills in Latin.
Dr. Du Graf has published scholarly articles on literature and film in Comparative Literary Studies, Adaptation, and Film Quarterly. Along with Julie Elsky and Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche, she is co-editing a special anniversary issue of Yale French Studies devoted to existentialism. She is the winner of several awards and grants including the A. Owen Aldridge Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, research fellowships at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the Manuscript and Rare Book Library at Emory University, as well as a residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. In 2016, Dr. Du Graf presented her paper “Retriangulating Franco-African-American Culture in Sound, Image, and Text,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association at Harvard University. The following year she presented her work “New Approaches to Existentialism and the Absurd” at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Languages Association in Philadelphia. Her essays on film, art, and literature have appeared in a range of non-scholarly publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Film Comment, Reverse Shot and The Daily Beast. In 2016, she was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center for the New York Film Festival Critics Academy.
Fellowship Research
While in residence at the Mandel Center, Dr. Du Graf prepared materials related to two research projects: first, her book manuscript, tentatively titled “Ambivalent Americanism: U.S. Literary Modernism in France and Algeria after 1940”, and second, a scholarly article on the transnational editorial work of the French Jewish scholar, poet, translator, and Holocaust survivor Jean Wahl (1888-1974). Drawing on the Museum's resources, she sought to deepen her research into Wahl's editorial career while he was in the United States.
Dr. Du Graf was in residence from December 1, 2017, to July 31, 2018.