Claire Lyu

Associate Professor

E-mail:
Phone: 434-924-7158
Office: 202 Levering Hall
Spring Office Hours: Mondays, 11:00 - 1:00, and by appointment

Research Interests:

19th-Century French Literature, Modern Poetry and Poetics, Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Literature and Science.

Education:

• Bachelor of Arts (BA), Wellesley College
• Master of Arts (MA), Johns Hopkins University
• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Johns Hopkins University

Research:

1. Nineteenth-century poetry, especially Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Poetry's convergence with and divergence from other non-poetic experiences -- such as intoxication and fashion -- and the concomitant negation and perpetuation of poetry's specific identity.

2. Interrogation of how constructions of certain core concepts -- such as body, knowledge, coherence, beauty, and elegance, for example -- intersect across different disciplines from the sciences (natural, medical, physical, and mathematical) to the humanities (literature, art, philosophy). In particular, the ways in which medical scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers have opened the human body -- whether literally or figuratively -- in order to expose its inside, and how the accessing of its interior is conceived as one of the most powerful ways of knowing the body.

3. Phenomenology and The Art of Reading

4. Human/Animal Relationship

Representative Publications:

• "Flaubert's Proposition" (Forthcoming)
• A Sun within a Sun: The Power and Elegance of Poetry (2006)
• "Unswathing the Mummy: Body, Knowledge, and Writing in Gautier's Le roman de la momie" (2005)
• "Mallarmé's Fashion" (2000)
• "Stéphane Mallarmé as Miss Satin: The Texture of Fashion and Poetry" (2000)

Teaching:

19th-Century Literature and Poetry.

Modern Literature, Poetry, Theory and Philosophy.

Courses Taught:

Undergraduate

                The Writing and Reading of Texts

                Literature of the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries

                Romanticism

                Modern Poetry

                Baudelaire

                Topics in Cultural Studies: Bodily Knowledge

Graduate

                Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé

                Modern Poetry and Poetics

                The Spiritual and the Everyday

                Gravity

                Topics in Theory and Criticism

Honors:

All-University Outstanding Teaching Award, 2000-2001.
Z-Society Distinguished Faculty Award, 2001.
Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, 2001-2002.