Matthew Senior

  • Ruberta T. McCandless Professor of French
  • Chair, French and Italian Department
Matthew Senior.

Contact

Peters Hall 401

Matthew.Senior@oberlin.edu

440-775-8186

Websites:

Areas of Study

Education

  • BA, University of Kansas, 1976
  • Licence ès Lettres, La Sorbonne, Paris IV, 1978
  • PhD, Yale University, 1990

Biography

I teach French language, literature, and culture courses, from beginning French to intermediate and advanced surveys and seminars on early modern literature, philosophy, and art. At all levels, my goal is the same: to help, challenge, coach, provoke, inspire, and collaborate with Oberlin students in their acquisition of the French language and their exploration of the multifaceted, storied culture that French has always carried with it, in metropolitan France and in many corners of the world.

Learning another language and culture is one of the most important and lasting achievements of a college education: It opens new linguistic worlds and sharpens one’s understanding of one’s own language and culture and stimulates critical thinking.

On a shrinking planet, where all too often political decisions are based on calculations of wealth, power, and violence rather than peace and intercultural understanding, we need more practice positioning ourselves in other cultures and speaking their languages.

Fall 2026

Français élémentaire I — FREN 101

Pratiques de l'écrit — FREN 321

Atelier lyrique: poésie, chanson, opéra — FREN 450

My current research and upper-level teaching interests focus on representations of the natural world in early modern France. In my work on zoos, medical and religious practices, literature, and philosophy, I have been studying a major shift in knowledge and sensibilities toward nature during the period 1500-1800, as a Renaissance paradigm of relatedness to nature and microcosm was being replaced by a mechanistic, Cartesian world view.

I have edited three collections of essays on the history and philosophy of animality: Animots: Postanimality in French Thought (Yale French Studies, 127, 2015); A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment (Berg, 2007); and Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History from the Middle Ages to the Present (Routledge, 1997) and contributed essays to these as well.

A related area of interest of mine is the process by which humans create themselves, mentally and symbolically, as human beings, a practice modern philosophers have called “supreme humanization” (Nietzsche), “hominisation” (Teilhard de Chardin), “anthropogenesis” (Giorgio Agamben), and “anthropotechnics” (Peter Sloterdijk).

This ties into my earlier research on the role of confession in the formation of the self in Western history, the subject of my first book: In the Grip of Minos: Confessional Discourse in Dante, Corneille, and Racine (Ohio State University Press, 1994).

Notes

Matthew Senior Article Published in French Literature Journal

Ruberta T. McCandless Professor of French Matthew Senior published “Between Horror and Sadness: The Plague Paintings of Poussin, Sweerts, and Mignard” in Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature. The article analyzes restraint and decorum in plague paintings by classical painters compared to shocking depictions of the plague by Boccaccio, Defoe, and others.

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