MICHELLE BLOOM
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature/French
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Brown University, 1995
DEA in Film Studies, Université de Paris III - la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997
Michelle Bloom directs the Comparative Literature Program and teaches comparative literature, film and French. Among her favorite courses to teach are Autobiography; Existentialism; France and Asia; the French New Wave; and Introduction to French Film.
Professor Bloom’s first book, Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession (University of Minnesota, 2003) examines wax figures and wax museums and in literature, cinema, history and popular culture.
Since the publication of Waxworks , Professor Bloom's work has taken a turn to the East. Teaching at UCR has inspired her to offer courses on “France and Asia,” a topic which has recently became the focus of her second major project (in progress). In her work on the aesthetic and cultural interactions between France and East Asia (China, Japan and Taiwan), Professor Bloom aims to go beyond the polarities of orientalism, instead considering contemporary cinema, literature, cuisine and fashion through the optics of translation, citation and fusion.
Her first article on this topic is devoted to two recent “Franco-Chinese” films, Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time is it There? and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 22.4) She is also working on the connections between Kurosawa and Van Gogh. Professor Bloom has published on Truffaut and Henry James; Baudelaire and Wagner; Balzac and Champleury; Villiers and Zola. Her article “Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illusions of Movement: Animation from Hoffmann to Truffaut” appears in Comparative Literature, Fall (December) 2000, vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 291-320 .
Outside of the classroom and her office, Professor Bloom runs the monthly French film series at Coffee Depot and likes to bake (and eat!) madeleines.
Links: inks:
http://library.ucr.edu/?l=news&article=331
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/bloom_waxworks.html
http://www.coffeedepot.tv/
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10509208.asp
thanks to Craig Stein for the photo for this web page |
