Dr. Anne Larsen of the Hope College French faculty was accepted at the NEH Summer Institute "A Literature of Their Own? Women Writing: Venice, London, Paris 1550-1700," to be held in July at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The institute will feature three units on women writers in Venice, London, and Paris, respectively. The unit on Venice will focus on the mythology, political organization, and cultural milieu of Venice itself, followed by a study of the various "classes" of women and the poetic and religious works of a dozen individual women. The unit on London is organized around the writings of six women writers (Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Clifford, Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn). The unit on Paris will focus on the large role women played in the development of the novel in France during the seventeenth century.
Five social and literary historians of note will head the institute. Held for 30 college and university professors in the humanities, the event is sponsored by the Society for Values in Higher Education and supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Larsen is currently a treasurer and executive committee member for the newly formed French International Society for the Study of Pre-Revolutionary Women. She is organizing chair of French Literature papers for the annual Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, and was nominated in December for election to the executive committee of the Sixteenth-Century French Literature Division of the Modern Language Association.
Among other publications, she is the author of a critically-acclaimed three-volume collection of the works of Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, mother-daughter authors who lived in Poitiers, France, in the 16th century. She also co-edited the collection "Writings by Pre-Revolutionary French Women. From Marie de France to Elizabeth Vigee-Le Brun."
She is a professor of French at Hope. She joined the faculty in 1984.