Heidi Brevik-Zender is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature.  Her research interests are in French literature, visual media, and material culture of the long nineteenth century, and she has published widely on fashion and the body, gender, architecture, urban space, exile, and issues of modernity. Her latest projects include a forthcoming article on France and Thailand which focuses on French receptions of Thai queens’ garments and fashioned bodies from the 1860s to the 1960s, a study on gendered interior space in the nineteenth-century Parisian studio photographs of the Italian-born Countess de Castiglione, and an examination of the commodification of insurrectionary history in a contemporary Parisian menswear brand, viewed against the backdrop of Macron-era neoliberalism and the gilets jaunes (Yellow Vest) protests. Her current book, supported by a U.K. Fulbright Visiting Professor Fellowship, is on architecture and gender in late-nineteenth-century France.

Dr. Brevik-Zender is co-organizer of the Global 19th Century Workshop at UCR, which supports faculty and graduate student interdisciplinary research on all aspects of the material, cultural, intellectual, and scientific intersections of practices and formations of knowledge in the long 19th century.  For more information please see UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society.

Books:

Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco.  State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 2018.

Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris (University of Toronto Press, 2015).

Articles and Book Chapters:

“Crypto-colonialism, French Couture, and Thailand’s Queens:  Fashioning the Body Politic 1860-1960.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2019.1652044.

“Fashion’s Trace: The Material Eternal in Sand’s Indiana, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Maupassant’s Bel-Ami.” In Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco. State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 2018. 109-134.

“Unpacking Texts: Émile Zola’s Pages d’Exil as Suitcase Narrative.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 45.1-2 (2016): 82-97.

“Family Matters: Mallarmé’s Gazette du monde et de la famille.” Modern Language Review 3.3 (2016): 684-702.

“Literary Representations: Fashion in the Age of Empire” A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion, The Age of Empire (Volume 5 of 6).  Editor Susan Vincent, Volume Editor, Denise Baxter.  London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

“Interstitial Narratives: Rethinking the Feminine Spaces of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century French Fashion Plates.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 36.2 (2014): 91-123.

“Fashion and Fin-de-siècle Feminisms in Rachilde’s La Jongleuse.” The French Review 87.3 (2014): 131-144.

“Writing Fashion from Balzac to Mallarmé.” Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. Ed. Gloria Groom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. 36-45. (Translated in French as “Ecrire la mode, de Balzac à Mallarmé” in L’Impressionnisme et la Mode. Trans. Alice Ertaud. Ed. Gloria Groom and Guy Cogeval. Paris: Musée d’Orsay/Skira-Flammarion, 2012.)

“‘A place where we ache to go again’: Fashion and Nostalgia in Mad Men.” Lucky Strikes and a Three Martini Lunch: Thinking about Television’s Mad Men. Eds. Jennifer C. Dunn, Jimmie Manning and Danielle Stern. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 27-43.

“Fashion and Fractured Flânerie in Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami.” DIX-NEUF, Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes. 16.2 (2012): 224-242.

“Undressing the Costume Drama: Catherine Breillat’s Une vieille maîtresse.” Adaptation. 5.2 (2012): 203-218.

“Let Them Wear Manolos: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.” Camera Obscura. 26.3 (2011): 1-33.

“Decadent Decors and Torturous Textiles: Fashion and Interior Design in the Fin-de-siècle Novels of Rachilde.” Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity. Eds. Alla Myzelev and John Potvin. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010. 105-123.

“Tracking Fashions: Risking it all at the Hippodrome de Longchamp.” The Spaces and Places of Fashion, 1800-2007. Ed. John Potvin, London: Routledge, 2008. 19-33.

Awards and Honors:

2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar to the U.K. – Visiting Professorship, University of Aberdeen, Scotland

Borchard Foundation Grantee and Convener, International Colloquium in France, July 2015, Château de la Bretesche, Missillac, France

Borchard Foundation Scholar in Residence, January – May 2013, Château de la Bretesche, Missillac, France

2011-2012 University Honors Faculty Mentor of the Year

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