Faculty



















George POE
Professor of French and French Studies
Gailor 219
(931) 598-1522
gpoe@sewanee.edu

Courses:
French Language Courses
French 405: The 18th Century
French 411: Culture through History
French 413: Modern France through Films and Other Texts
French 420: French Studies Senior Seminar

Education:
- Davidson College: 1970-74 — B.A. 1974
 High Honors in French for an honor's thesis on formal aspects of seventeenth-century French comedy
- Middlebury College: 1974-75 — M.A. 1975
 Mention Très Bien for a master's mémoire entitled "Molière sur scène," submitted to Alexandre Micha
 (Professeur en Sorbonne), Paris, May 1975
- Duke University: 1975-78 (absentia 1978-81; full-time teaching at Davidson, 1978-82) — Ph.D. 1981
 Dissertation on the rococo littéraire of eighteenth-century France, director Philip Stewart
 
Profile:
Following a four-year term position at Davidson College, George Poe taught at Hanover College for five years, where he published a revised and expanded version of his dissertation, with a particular focus on Marivaux's comedy and the stylistic nexus between that corpus and the eighteenth-century French rococo littéraire; the book is still mentioned in the on-line 6th edition of the Columbia University Encyclopedia and at multiple websites as the resource to consult on Marivaux's comedy. Professor Poe received tenure at Hanover in 1986 and was promoted subsequently, though he left for Sewanee before teaching at the new rank. Having received tenure at Sewanee at the Associate rank in 1990 following an expedited probationary period, Poe was then promoted to full Professor in spring of 1997. He was Chair of the Department of French from 1994 to 2000 and filled in again during the spring semester of 2002. During his time in the chair, the Department established an alternative-track French Studies major—in parallel to its traditional literary French major—with more emphasis on the arts and social sciences and on the broader Francophone world, and with an intentional focus on speaking and writing French effectively for potential uses outside of the academy. Professor Poe has probably taught over thirty different courses during his professional career, from French language, culture, and literature courses to senior major seminars and courses taught abroad. He was honored as the 2003-04 "Teacher of the Year" by the Society of Sewanee Scholars. Professor Poe has also been closely involved in international education throughout his twenty-eight years of full-time teaching, beginning with his direction of the "Davidson in Montpellier" JYA program while teaching at Davidson; since that time, he has organized and directed nine shorter study-abroad enterprises in Québec and in France (Poe founded Sewanee's ongoing "Summer in France" program in 1989 and, more recently, has been looking for opportunities, with his colleagues, for a spring semester-abroad program). In light of his experiences, he has been called on to speak about international education, and he has served on the boards of two study-abroad programs — Sarah Lawrence's program in Paris, and IAU's Aix-en-Provence and Avignon programs where he also served as the advisory board chair for a few years.
 
Professor Poe coedited and contributed to a volume in 1995 entitled The French Novel (New Paradigm Press), and he has published articles and book reviews in various journals throughout his career (e.g., L'Esprit Créateur, Philosophy and Literature, Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography [multiple reviews], Revue Marivaux, Claudel Studies); an entry entitled "French Influence in the South" will likewise be appearing soon in the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Poe has also read papers and/or moderated sessions at the MLA national convention (where he was the Delegate Assembly representative of the Division on Comparative Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature for three years), at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and at other colloquia and workshops. Then too, Professor Poe has been a member of the Conseil d'Administration of the Société Marivaux (Paris & Nantes) and has served on the editorial board of a journal. And he has been called on by several institutions to serve as an outside reviewer in cases of promotion and tenure. Poe was selected to be a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (spring 1992) and was invited back three years later to serve as Replacement Director and Visiting Scholar in Residence (fall 1995). As for more current scholarly undertakings, he is, among other things, modernizing and editing a French epistolary novel that was an eighteenth-century bestseller and needs to be reintroduced to modern audiences; and he is concurrently working on a related study where the latter novel and four others are being—and will be—analyzed for formal and thematic commonality and difference. As for institutional service, Professor Poe has had a wide array of committee assignments throughout his career (sometimes chairing) and has been involved in numerous searches, with coordinating duties at the departmental level.
 
Outside of his professional activities, Professor Poe enjoys following sports of all kinds (though particularly basketball), plays a little golf, keeps up with French wines and French cinema, likes to interact with minority and international students around campus, and tries to stay in touch, more generally, with as many of his students as is possible — both current ones and alums.