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RESEARCH
HELP > HUMANITIES
AND AREA STUDIES > FRENCH
AND ITALIAN STUDIES
French and Italian Studies
General Information
Sarah B. Sussman, Curator
Green Library — HASRC, McDermott Suite
Stanford, CA 94305-6066
voice: (650) 723-9481
fax: (650) 725-1068
email: ssussman@stanford.edu
Other staff in various programs and departments contribute to our
efforts in collection development and instruction. They include
Jane Vaden, the
French/Italian specialist in the Acquisitions Department who orders
materials selected by the curator, colleagues in both the humanities
and social sciences resource groups, and counterparts in coordinate
libraries.
A bit of history
(see also Collections on Special Topics,
Government Documents, Publications
and Collections Guides).
In French studies, the collections’ strengths may be exemplified
in its holdings on the political culture of the early modern and
modern periods, eighteenth-century literature and intellectual history,
contemporary literature, and social history in general. The Gustave
Gimon Collection on French Political Economy anchors a wide-ranging
collection on this subject, with particular depth in 18th and 19th
century materials. Some individual collections are described separately;
others may be seen through SOCRATES headings or through consultation
with the curator. Significant large microfilm collections include
the French Revolution Research Collection and its videodisk of images,
the documents on Jansenism from the library of Port-Royal, and the
French sections of the Goldsmiths’-Kress Library collections;
smaller collections cover French theater, woman’s studies,
economic history, the Dreyfus affair, and French Protestantism.
Other resources include a sizable collection of both classic and
current French films, historical maps of France and of its colonies,
and a large number of historical, current academic and popular journals.
Stanford Libraries also subscribe to a growing number of digital
text collections, such as ARTFL and the Voltaire électronique.
In recent years we have acquired smaller but defined sets of material
of interest to particular academic programs, such as a range of
popular literature of both the early modern and modern period (from
the Bibliothèque bleue to the historical novel of the 20th
century), French Situationism, feminism, and a variety of early
dictionaries and reference works that were instrumental in the diffusion
of learning. Reflecting research trends, efforts are underway to
enhance our holdings in the literature and history the Maghreb,
Francophone Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as on migrants from
former French colonies to the metropole. To meet increased demands
for resources, the library has acquired a significant block of films
on Africa and a large set of novels, political studies, and travelers’
books, as well as a collection of postcards sent by French travelers
in Africa from 1900-1920.
Italian studies collections emphasize the Medieval and Renaissance
periods and contemporary civilization, with a growing interest in
the early 20th century and a major focus on Futurism. As programs
change, the collections are also expanding in the Italian baroque,
history of science, Vico studies, Italian Romanticism and in the
later periods of unification. The history of early modern Italy
has been a major collecting area in recent years, and includes several
small manuscript collections focusing on banking, family history,
and women in religious orders, as well as a collection of 16th-and
17th-century funeral orations and a set of data tapes on 15th-century
Florentine catasti.
In contemporary Italian studies, the library’s strengths are
concentrated in poetry, the novel, film, and women’s studies,
with a focus on links between literature, politics, and society.
Recent acquisitions include a representative range of material on
technical change and on the life and work of F.T. Marinetti. Women’s
studies collections have grown through acquisition of journal backfiles,
such as NoiDonne,
contemporary memoirs, and a small but significant archive on the
writer Dacia Maraini, with material on the context for both her
writing and political activism.
Last modified:
March 11, 2009
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