Dr. Reinier Leushuis (M.A. Utrecht University 1993, Ph.D. Princeton University 2000) specializes in early modern dialogue, the literary treatment of marriage and friendship, the cultural connections between France and Italy, and the continuation and transformation of medieval genres in the French Renaissance. He is the author of a book entitled Le Mariage et l'«amitié courtoise» dans le dialogue et le récit bref de la Renaissance (Florence: Olschki, 2003 [click here for abstract]) in which he focuses on the humanist ideals of marriage and courtly friendship as they emerge in the dialogues and short narrative texts of sixteenth-century writers such as Erasmus, Castiglione, Rabelais, and Marguerite de Navarre. Moreover, he has published articles on Petrarch, Erasmus, Marguerite de Navarre, Jean de Meun, and Joachim Du Bellay in journals such as French Forum, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly, Romanic Review and Neophilologus (click here for a list of publications). He is currently working on a book project on the influence of Italian literary dialogues, in particular the "dialogo amoroso", on French authors of the period 1550-1580 (Sperone Speroni, Torquato Tasso, Leone Ebreo, Stefano Guazzo, Pontus de Tyard, Louise Labé, Marguerite de Navarre, Michel de Montaigne).

Dr. Reinier Leushuis is also interested in twentieth-century constructions of the past and issues of cultural memory, in particular of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. For instance he translated and published with Prof. Lionel Gossman at Princeton University a study by Willem Otterspeer on the Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies) and co-organized (with Dr. Lori Walters, Dr. Alec Hargreaves, and Dr. Aimée Boutin) the conference "Cultural Memory in France: Margins and Centers", held at the Winthrop-King Institute of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at FSU. He subsequently co-edited the proceedings of this conference as a guest-editor for the Journal of European Studies.

Dr. Leushuis received the First Year Assistant Professor Grant in 2001 and the COFRS Award for Faculty Research in 2004.

Dr. Reinier Leushuis speaks about his teaching:

Several of my MA students continued their studies and careers at the PhD level. Irène Iakounina (French) was accepted in the PhD program at Yale University, where she continued exploring the French Renaissance with Professor Edwin Duval. While starting a PhD program in the field of Spanish Medieval studies, Ibtissam Bouachrine attended two of my seminars in French Renaissance literature in 2002. She went on to finish her PhD at Tulane University and currently holds a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at Smith College. In Italian, Marco Cerocchi, who took my French-Italian Renaissance seminar in 2002, was accepted in the PhD program at Rutgers University, where he successfully defended his dissertation in 2005. At the Undergraduate level, I much enjoyed directing the Honors Thesis of Padrah Reichman, who in the Spring of 2005 completed an excellent and truly original research project on the nineteenth-century Franco-Russian choreographer Marius Petipa.

Courses Frequently Taught

Graduate

• FRW 5586 Studies in Sixteenth Century Literature:Voice and Dialogue in French Renaissance Literature (in French)
• FOL 5934/ITW 5415 Studies in Modern Lang. & Lit. - French / Italian Renaissance Literature:Dialogues of the French and Italian Renaissance (in English)
• ITW 5415 Italian Renaissance Literature: Il Rinascimento italiano: letteratura umanistica e cortese (in Italian)