About the 2026 International Speaker Series
“Topographic Imaginary: Art and the Environs of Greater Paris” with Dr. Ari Blatt, professor and chair of the Department of French at the University of Virginia
Date: Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Time: 5-7:30 p.m.
Format: In Person
Location: Plemmons Student Union 417 (Beacon Heights)
Description: On March 24, Dr. Blatt will give an interdisciplinary lecture that crosses disciplines from literature to fine arts. He touches on literature, photography, walking, and writing as we begin attending to space and place, finding beauty in the banal. Building on The Topographic Imaginary, Blatt encourages us to think about everyday environments — both natural and manmade — at the intersection of image and memory, history, and affect.
Details: This event is free and open to the public. For a disability accommodation, visit odr.appstate.edu.
Hosts: The Appalachian State University Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the College of Arts and Sciences Billy and Del Hunt Helton Faculty Excellence Fund, and the Office of International Programs
Questions can be directed to the organizers: Dr. Benito Del Pliego (delpliegob@appstate.edu) and Dr. Stephanie Tsakeu Mazan (tsakeumazansd@appstate.edu).
About the Speaker
Dr. Ari Blatt is professor and chair of the Department of French at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on modern and contemporary French literature and visual culture. He is the author of Pictures into Words: Images in Contemporary French Fiction (Nebraska, 2012) and co-editor, with Edward Welch, of France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture (Liverpool, 2019). Blatt's most recent book, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography (Liverpool, 2022), is about picturing place. He is currently working on French culture’s fascination for the diagonale du vide, or “empty diagonal,” and has been pondering what it might look like to make the work we do in the humanities less coolly detached and clinical and, instead, more expressly personal.