Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures

Language(s) Taught

French

Teaching/Research

late-19th and 20th century France

Degrees/Certifications

• PhD in French with a minor in Italian (2013), Stanford University
• BA in Comparative Literature (2007), Vanderbilt University

Personal Bio

Dr. Darci Gardner specializes in French literature and culture of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research and teaching emphasize an interdisciplinary approach to learning—focusing on how narrative, media, and culture shape interpretations of justice, memory, and identity.

Her publications center on Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Marie Krysinska, a Polish-French immigrant writer who faced antisemitic attacks in the press. Her scholarship also addresses questions of Jewish identity and representation in the crime fiction that Belgian author Georges Simenon wrote during World War II, as well as theatre censorship and legal debates from the Dreyfus affair era.

Since joining the faculty at App State as an assistant professor in 2014, she has taught Jewish writers, representations of World War II, and problems of tolerance and identity in Masterworks of French Literature (FRE 3030), French Literature and Film (FRE 3035), Women Writers of French Expression (FRE 2055), and French Culture and Civilization (FRE 3040). She has also led multiple study-abroad programs that brought students to sites of remembrance in France.

As the graduate program director for the M.A. tracks in K-12 and college teaching in French and Spanish, she mentored teaching assistants and worked extensively with active and aspiring educators. Subsequently, as the founding director of High Country Humanities, she collaborated with community partners and secured external grants for public-facing programs on Jewish culture and history—ranging from interactive seminars on Marc Chagall’s diaspora art to musical programs confronting the Reich’s censorship of so-called “degenerate” music.

In 2026, Dr. Gardner assumed leadership as director of App State’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, where she guides its mission to promote tolerance, understanding, and Holocaust education through academic programs and community engagement.

Selected Publications

Book in Preparation

Leveraging Irrationality: How Storytellers Exploit Cognitive Biases (under revision)

Annotated Critical Edition

Volume 2 of Marie Krysinska's Œuvres complètes, edited by Florence Goulesque and Seth Whidden. Éditions Honoré Champion, 2022. Co-authored with Laurent Robert.

Journal Articles

"Appropriation and Revision as Subversion in Intermèdes: Krysinska's Palimpsests." Dix-neuf, vol. 26, no. 3, 2022, pp. 139–154.

"Reading, Attention, and Poetic Suggestion: 'Éventail (de Madame Mallarmé).'" French Studies, vol. 76, no. 2, April 2022, pp. 193–209.

"Cognitive Bias and Narrative Credibility in Proust." Philosophy and Literature, vol. 45, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1–16.

"Simenon's Criminals and Collaborators: Anchoring and the Task of Assigning Guilt." Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 24, no. 5, 2020, pp. 592–99.

"Landscapes and Perceptual Distortions in Proust." Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 48, no. 1 & 2, Fall–Winter 2019–2020, pp. 130–48.

"Krysinska's Rythmes pittoresques: Theorizing Poetry before Mallarmé's Critical Poems." Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 46, no. 1 & 2, Fall–Winter 2017–2018, pp. 73–92.

"Rereading as a Mechanism of Defamiliarization in Proust." Poetics Today, vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, pp. 55–105.

"Pourquoi privilégier la poésie?: La réponse des 'récits' de Bonnefoy." Romance Notes, vol. 53, no. 1, 2013, pp. 11–20.

Encyclopedia Entries and Reviews

Review of Proust: A Jewish Way, by Antoine Compagnon. Studies in the Novel, vol. 57, no. 3, Fall 2025, pp. 345–47.

"Paul Cézanne." In The Literary Encyclopaedia. Vol. 1.5.2: French Nineteenth Century, edited by Beth Gerwin and David Evans. The Literary Dictionary Company, London. 18 February 2025.

"Charles Cros." In The Literary Encyclopaedia. Vol. 1.5.2: French Nineteenth Century, edited by Beth Gerwin and David Evans. The Literary Dictionary Company, London. 5 September 2024.

Selected Invited Talks

"Marie Krysinska." Department of French Studies. Wake Forest University. 18 Feb. 2026.

"In Search of Lost Time [1913]." The Global Novel Podcast. Interview by Claire Hennessy, with François Proulx. 15 Aug. 2024.

"Drawing Invalid Moral Inferences." The Triangle French HIstory and Culture Seminar. National Humanities Center, 10 Sept. 2023.

"Literature and Cognitive Biases." The Research Workshop in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts. Stanford University, 18 Oct. 2022.

Selected Grants

"Archival Research on Marie Krysinska's Plays and the Napoleonic Code." University Research Council Grant, 2026.

"A New Academic Success Course and Speaker Series on Career Paths in the Humanities." Modern Language Association Pathways Step Grant, 2025-26.

"Béla Bartók: Father of Folk." Watauga Arts Council Grassroots Grant, 2024-25.

"Bridging the Divide between Classical Music and Folk Traditions: Béla Bartók's Legacy." North Carolina Humanities Small Project Grant, 2024-25.

National Humanities Center Summer Resident, June 2024.

"Connecting Local and Global Rural Cultures." North Carolina Humanities Large Grant, 2023-24.

"Archival Research on the Influence of American Women Regionalist Writers in France." Board of Trustees International Research Travel Grant, 2023.