Catherine Perry

Catherine Perry, who teaches French and Francophone Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has written the book Persephone Unbound: Dionysian Aesthetics in the Works of Anna de Noailles (Bucknell UP, 2003), in which she examines Noailles' poetry and prose in relation to philosophical and aesthetic currents in early 20th-century France, with particular attention to Noailles’ literary connections with Proust.

In addition to publishing on writers as diverse as Ronsard, Balzac, Stendhal, Rilke, Valéry, Barrès, Gérard d’Houville, Nicole Brossard, and Malika Oufkir, she has written on Proust’s literary relationship with Anna de Noailles for the Bulletin Marcel Proust 49 (1999). More information is available on the website she created for Anna de Noailles, http://www.annadenoailles.org.

Catherine Perry regularly teaches a graduate seminar on Proust and, in this context, she invited William Carter twice to Notre Dame, in 2000 and 2010, to highlight his work and to support graduate students. She has also written an introduction to French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff and the Pen, a bilingual anthology of women’s poetry in French from the Middle Ages to the present, translated by Norman Shapiro (Baltimore UP, 2008), and she has recently edited and introduced the first bilingual book of poems by Anna de Noailles, translated by Norman Shapiro, A Life of Poems, Poems of a Life (Black Widow Press, 2012).