Fall 2024 Courses
FREN 302- Writing Workshop
FREN 311- Middle Ages to Enlightenment
FWIS 183- Utopia/Dystopia: Pol. of Space
Valentin Duquet teaches courses in English and French studies, with a special interest in geopolitics, global affairs, commerce, and the history of ideas. At Rice, he created and has been teaching the popular “Utopias and Dystopias” first-year writing intensive seminar (FWIS 183), which interrogates visions of the future and of the exotic from Plato to the current day. As a faculty member in the department of Modern & Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures, he also revamped and taught the “Major Works” sequence of courses—“Middle Ages to Enlightenment” (FREN 311) and “The French Revolution to World War II” (FREN 312)—looking at history-making artifacts of the Francosphere across genres, regions and media.
Originally from eastern France, Dr. Duquet holds a Master’s degree from the University of Strasbourg and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, with a minor concentration in Middle Eastern studies. He has published extensively in French and Francophone literature with a focus on settler colonialism in North Africa and nineteenth-century utopianism in France and its empire. Some of his recent peer-reviewed articles and chapters include “Zola et la révolte contre la violence nihiliste: Cheminement intellectuel du Ventre de Paris à Travail” (2025), “Deserts of the Real: Paris and the Algerian Sahara as Postmodern Simulacra in Malek Haddad’s Je t’offrirai une gazelle” (2024) and “Anachronistic Visions of Socialism and Colonial Endeavor: The Influence of Saint-Simonian Thought on Émile Zola’s Novels” (2022).
Selected Publications:
- “Anachronistic Visions of Socialism and Colonial Endeavor: The Influence of Saint-Simonian Thought on Émile Zola’s Novels.” Excavatio, vol. XXXIII (2022). http://aizen.zolanaturalismassoc.org/excavatio/journal.html.
- “Terror & Tremor: Earthquakes and Terrorism in Maïssa Bey’s Surtout ne te retourne pas.” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: SITES, vol. 24, no. 3 (2020), pp. 297-305. https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2020.1785730.
- “Victoire: La vie fardée de Maryse Condé.” French Forum, vol. 44, no. 2, (2019), pp. 257–271. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/747816.