Alumni Profiles Series: Anne O’Neil-Henry

Anne O’Neil-Henry received her B.A. in French and Spanish from the University of Pennsylvania before pursuing a M.A. in Spanish at Middlebury College and her Ph.D. in French through the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her dissertation focused on positivism in Paris through mid-nineteenth century novels such as those written by Honoré de Balzac, Paul de Kock, and Émile Zola. Upon graduating in 2011, she accepted a position at Georgetown University where she is currently an associate professor of French and Francophone Studies. Following the publication of her first book on popular literature of the nineteenth century, Professor O’Neil-Henry is now pursuing the environmental humanities through the cultural phenomenon of the World’s Fair.

What led you to pursue a doctorate in French, and what made Duke’s Department of Romance Studies stand out to you?

I had studied both French and Spanish in college, and I was unsure about which one I wanted to pursue. I had always wanted to teach, but I didn’t know if I wanted to teach at the high school level or at the college level. I started out by doing a master’s program in Spanish, which was great because it enabled me to live for a year in Madrid. I loved it, but I felt the pull to come back to French. So, one of the things I loved about Duke initially was that [their program] is in a Romance Studies department, as opposed to a purely French department. Because I was still on the fence about what exactly I wanted to do, I thought that there would be some flexibility given [the structure of] the department itself.

I was immediately drawn to Duke. I appreciated the size of the department, the structure of the program. I liked that you could start teaching relatively early in the program. I was really excited to start teaching! I also wanted to work with the faculty who were all so great. I really loved the interdisciplinary nature of the program.

Did you have any hesitations?

Because I had taken a year to live in Madrid—and I took another year off before I did that, too—and spent some time doing other things before deciding this was the track I wanted, I felt pretty confident at that point. I felt so lucky to have gotten into Duke so that I could do this in the way that I wanted to.

Do you have any research projects that you’re currently developing?

I do! I’m in the process of writing a book on the World’s Fairs in nineteenth-century Paris. I’m interested in popular culture, and that’s always been my thing. This was an interesting angle to be able to study the press, popular literature, and cultural artifacts like souvenirs. I’ve been working on this for a while, and because I’m also interested in environmental humanities, I’m writing about how different forms of energy were on display at the expos, how that permeated in popular culture, and how it changed from the first one in 1855 to the last one in 1900. It’s been feeling very relevant lately with the Olympics being held in Paris. I’m hoping to finish by the end of the next academic year so I’m ready to be done with it, but it’s been a great project. It has enabled me to go to France and do lots of cool archival work. Because there are so many sources and the World’s Fairs cover such a wide range of topics, it can be challenging to know how to limit the scope of the project.

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Will you be including a literary aspect in this project?

Yes! I have a chapter that I’m still developing right now where I’m looking at vaudevilles that were written for and about the expos. Definitely less canonical literature and more of those popular works that aren’t studied as much. I’m hoping to figure out another component; that’s the last thing I have to plan, this chapter on literature of the exhibitions.

How have your research interests shifted since your time at Duke?

There’s a historical shift and then a methodological shift. I wrote my dissertation on July Monarchy France, so the first half of the century, and I felt like that was really my specialty. My dissertation and my first book were more literary in terms of the sources that I was studying. I still was interested in popular literature, so my dissertation and first book were on some pretty canonical authors like Balzac, but I also worked on Paul de Kock and someone who’s gotten a lot more known in the past decade, Eugène Sue. I worked on the serial novel and on texts that were incredibly popular but disparaged by literary critics at the time. It was a fun and exciting project, but I was always interested in the World’s Fairs, which all took place in the second half of the century, so I had to learn more about this different period.

Like I said before, there is still some literature in this new project and I do close readings of the press, representations of the exhibitions, guidebooks, and other ephemeral objects. So I’m applying my literary studies training, but on the whole, I’m doing more of a cultural studies approach here. So it’s been a shift, learning to read and write about these different topics.

In the program at Duke, you were encouraged to take classes outside of the department. I was lucky enough to take two classes in art history, in the literature program, in the English department. In the Department of Romance Studies, too, it was very interdisciplinary. I feel like I got good preparation for doing this type of project.

Were there any foundational experiences or people at Duke that helped prepare you for your current role?

I was lucky to work with so many incredible people. My advisor was David Bell, who was a great mentor and helped me so much with my dissertation. Right at the end of my time was when Deborah Jenson came, and I was lucky enough to have her join my dissertation committee.  In the beginning of my time at Duke, I worked with Linda Orr. She was a phenomenal teacher and so good at pushing me to think beyond where I was comfortable, and I would say the same thing about Helen Solterer. Even though I wasn’t a medievalist, I took every medieval class she offered because I found her to be such an incredible teacher. I loved my pedagogy training with Clare Tufts and Deb Reisinger, and I still use the methods I got during the pedagogy class I took. It was so helpful; I think about it all the time. Such incredible teacher training.

I had such a nice group of people I was in classes with, and one summer, we had a reading group. We traded writing a lot. It didn’t feel too competitive: everybody wanted everybody to succeed. That’s one of the things about Duke: they only accept a small number of people so there are generally enough resources for everybody.

I also feel like I got really good professional mentoring for when I went on the job market. Again, David Bell was incredible about this. They let me come and give a practice job talk in front of people and they gave feedback. That was incredibly helpful, and I know not every place does that. Michele Longino did a practice MLA interview with me. There was overall great mentoring on how to navigate the job market. We got some funding to go to conferences. I got a Bass fellowship to go back to Paris after I had finished my year at ENS, spending a summer there to finish a chapter of my dissertation. I felt so supported. I know that’s an incredibly long answer, but there were just so many things along the way that were so helpful to me—it would be hard to name just one.

What advice do you wish you had known before pursuing a job in academia?

Having events where they bring in people in publishing or library sciences or any adjacent fields as alternatives for people who don’t end up taking the academic route, that could be helpful. I also think it would have been helpful to give students some kind of training for what happens as far as administrative work in academic jobs, whether that’s being on committees or figuring out how to make a budget for a department or conducting a job search. It’s funny because being a professor is a blend of teaching, research, and service/administration, but we don’t always get training for that third part before beginning the job.

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AUTHOR

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Abby H. Shepherd
Ph.D. student, Romance Studies

Abby H. Shepherd is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Romance Studies Department. She graduated with a B.A. in French Language, Literature, and Culture and a minor in Italian Studies from Auburn University. Her research interests focus on the nexus between nineteenth-century French literature and midcentury cinema, primarily through costuming and fashion history.