French & Italian Studies is delighted to welcome Assistant Professor of French Hannah Frydman to the department and to the University of Washington.
Frydman is joining the UW community after spending the past year as the Shauna M. Stark '76, P'10 Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender Studies at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, where she participated in the seminar “Narrating Debt.” She grew up in Kansas, got her B.A. in French Studies and History in Western Massachusetts and PhD in History at Rutgers University in New Jersey, then spent three years in Paris (as a study abroad student and as a researcher working in the city, departmental, national, and police archives). She is a happy newcomer to the West Coast. Frydman is a specialist in the history of modern France and in the history of women, gender, and sexuality and is very interested in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of media technologies and platforms, democracy, capitalism, labor, and how sexuality plays a role in these histories and in our present on the internet. When not working, she's probably taking her cats, Minou and Zazie, on walks in their stroller, reading science fiction, and trying not to overwater her plants.
Frydman will be teaching FRENCH 223 A / HSTEU 290 B: Sex, Commerce, and the Making of Paris in the Autumn 2021 quarter. The course will explore how Paris became the city of love, and examine how sexual commerce shaped the identity of the city, how the commercial spaces of the city shaped sexual identities, and how discourses about sexuality contributed to the legitimation of capitalism. Topics will include the construction of gender difference, the emergence of mass media, and the commercial origins of queer identities.