Effie Rentzou is professor of French and her research and teaching focus on modernism and the avant-garde. Her publications include Littérature malgré elle: Le surréalisme et la transformation du littéraire (2010), Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940 (2022), the edited volume 1913: The Year of French Modernism (2020), and many articles and book chapters on surrealism, the avant-garde, and poetry. In addition to her contributions to exhibition catalogues for the Metropolitan Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Guggenheim, and the Musée de l’art Moderne de Strasbourg, she co-curated the exhibition “Objets en question: Archéologie, ethnologie, avant-garde” at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (2025).
Her Old Dominion Research Professorship will support work on the book Surrealism Against Fascism, which explores the surrealist movement’s antifascist action and works in France during the period between 1930 and the end of WWII. Surrealism was an eminently political movement from its inception in the early 1920s in Paris and in all its permutations throughout the 20th century and throughout the world. During the period in question, 1930-1945, this general political positioning took the specific expression of battling fascism. Paris became the capital of antifascism in the 1930s, with world events informing the French political reality: the establishment of a fascist regime in Italy; Hitler’s rapid rise to power; the increasing popularity of the extreme right and fascist leagues in France; the formation of the Front Populaire as an antidote to the menace of fascism and its electoral victory of 1936; the Spanish Civil war and its impact on the French public opinion. All this mobilized not only political life but also French intellectuals. The surrealists were at the forefront of this mobilization. My project traces the genealogy of the surrealists’ engagement in the antifascist struggle to foreground their artistic production: literary texts, films, photographs, and periodicals, which were created as an integral part of the antifascist cause. The main theoretical question that motivates my project is the articulation of politics and aesthetics – in other words the political element in the work of art. This broad theoretical question gains renewed urgency during a period of dire crisis and becomes even more specific: can art and culture participate effectively in the resistance against a totalitarian, fascist regime? And what are the modalities of such an effective resistance?
Read her full biography on the Department of French and Italian website.
