Dr. Jay Lutz

While on sabbatical during the fall semester, Dr. Jay Lutz, professor of French, is engaged in a number of academic pursuits, taking him around the world.

This week, Dr. Lutz is a featured speaker at the 2016 International Caribbean Conference in Trinidad, “The Caribbean, Melting Pot of the Americas: From Upheaval and ‘Origins’ to the Historical Future and its Representations.” He will present a paper on the 2009 novel of Gérard Chenet, a Haitian writer, sculptor and general renaissance man. “I am very excited about this opportunity,” said Dr. Lutz, who met Chenet in Haiti in 2010 and saw him again in 2015.

Jay Lutz discusses African literature with Gérard Chenet at the L’Engouement artists’ space. Photo: Breaking Away blog

Dr. Lutz also successfully conducted research in France and Sweden. At the François-Mitterrand Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France) in Paris, Dr. Lutz researched Germain Casse, the political figure he is studying in order to connect Paris of the 1880s to the Caribbean.

Germain Casse

“I was able to read several of the pieces of legislation proposed by Germain Casse,” said Dr. Lutz. “The bills from the Chambre des Députés were mostly in a fragile state making their viewing impossible. I did, however, get to see two of the documents, including a proposal by Casse to give illegitimate children the means to request rights to inheritance. I also was able to read issues on microfilm of a minor radical newspaper at the end of the Second Empire for which Casse wrote.”

Dr. Lutz also worked at the Archives nationales d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, archives for “overseas France,” where he reviewed newspapers from Martinique from 1889 and 1890.

Sherman Adams / Photo: ProjectHBW.blogspot.com

Dr. Lutz spent a month in Sweden at the Kungliga Biblioteket (National Library) in Stockholm studying Sherman Adams, the African American activist, journalist and writer who lived in Sweden from 1963 until his untimely death in Denmark in 1986. While there, he attended a conference organized by the Swedish Institute for teachers of Swedish at the college level outside Sweden.

Later in October and November, Dr. Lutz will attend conferences of the Association of Swedish Teachers and Researchers in America (ASTRA) at the University of Colorado Boulder, and of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) in Jacksonville, Fla.

The François-Mitterrand Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France) on the Seine.