Wheaton English professor and writer-in-residence Sue Standing will teach literature and poetry writing and work on a series of poems in Toulouse, France, this fall as a Fulbright Scholar.

May 14, 2008

Wheaton English professor and writer-in-residence Sue Standing will teach literature and poetry writing and will work on a series of poems in Toulouse, France, this fall as a Fulbright Scholar.

At the Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, Standing will lecture primarily in the Départment des Études du Monde Anglophone (the department focusing on the arts, history and culture of the English-speaking world). She will also work closely with student poets and help design the university's first formal creative writing courses.

During her six months in France, Standing also plans to write a series of poems focused on the art of the itinerant medieval sculptor known as the Master of Cabestany. Her poem cycle will be set in the Languedoc landscapes and Romanesque churches where the artist worked during the 12th century.

Standing, who is the Jane Ruby Professor of English at Wheaton, has a keen interest in landscape, visual art and history, all of which influence and inform her writing. She plans to visit all the known sites of the Master's sculptures in churches and abbeys throughout Southern France and Tuscany.

"Toulouse, at the heart of the old Occitan world and the still living and breathing world of Occitan language and culture, is an ideal base for this project," Standing wrote in her Fullbright application. Occitan, or Langue d'Oc, was the language of the medieval troubadours; it is still spoken in parts of Southern France, Italy, Spain and Monaco.

Standing will write her poems in medieval forms and genres that are still in use today, such as albas, ballades, jeu parti, rondelets, terzanelles and villanelles. "At the same time and in the same places that the Master of Cabestany was chiseling his marvelous tympanum, capitals, and sarcophagi, the troubadour poets of Languedoc were inventing new poetic genres and forms. I will read the collection of chansonniers [song-poems] of the troubadours and learn more about their lives."

The poet will also immerse herself in other art forms rooted in the Middle Ages. "Much medieval music is still performed throughout Languedoc," she wrote, "and I will take advantage of the opportunity to listen to this music, visit other medieval sites, and hear present-day Occitan poets recite their work."

As a teacher of literature and creative writing at Wheaton, Standing has developed many innovative courses, such as "Word and Image," which focuses on the interrelationships between creative writing and visual imagery. She is a scholar of American literature as well as the literature and films of sub-Saharan Africa. Although she will be teaching primarily in English at the Université de Toulouse, she is looking forward to improving her fluency in speaking and writing French during her Fulbright experience. A better mastery of French, she says, will be valuable to her study of Francophone (French-speaking) African authors and on future research trips to Mali, Senegal and Burkina Faso.