Faculty Directory

Summary of Expertise

Early Modern Cultural Studies
Literary and Cultural Theory
French
Queer Theory
Feminism
Popular Culture and Cultural Studies
Affect
Animal Studies

Research Interests

Renaissance studies; French and Italian language and literature; early modern studies; postcolonial theories and literature; contemporary feminist theories and politics; queer theory; U.S. popular culture; posthumanism; affect; animal studies

Biography, Education and Training

1984 Ph.D. Yale University, Renaissance Studies
1980 M.Phil. Yale University, Renaissance Studies
1977 B.A. cum laude Harvard University, History & Literature

Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness, and Affiliated Faculty in Feminist Studies at UCSC, where she has taught since 1991. Her books include Father Figures (Cornell,1991); Popular Culture (NYU, 1999); and Queer/Early/Modern (Duke, 2006). She co-edited Premodern Sexualities (Routledge, 1996); Species/Race/Sex, a special issue of American Quarterly 65.3 (2013); and Animots, a special issue of Yale French Studies 127 (2015). Her current book project, on nonhuman animals and figuration, is Animate Figures. In 2010 she won the Critical Animal Studies Faculty Paper of the Year. Her fields include early modern European literature and history; critical theory; feminist and queer theories; popular culture and cultural studies; psychoanalysis and animal studies.

Honors, Awards and Grants

2010 Critical Animal Studies Faculty Paper of the Year
2009 UCHRI Residential Seminar: Species Spectacles
2003-07 Humanities Distinguished Professor, UCSC
2001-02 UC President's Fellowship in the Humanities

Selected Publications

• BOOKS
• Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
• Popular Culture: An Introduction (NYU Press, 1999). Japanese translation, 2001.
• Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996). Co-edited with Louise Fradenburg.
• Premodern Sexualities in Europe. Special Issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 1:4, 1995. Co-edited with Louise Fradenburg.
• Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
• "Les chats de Derrida," in Queer Theory After Derrida, ed. Michael O'Rourke (Palgrave, 2009, in progress).
• "Romeo and Juliet Love Death," in Shakesqueer, ed. Madhavi Menon (Duke University Press, 2010), 436-444.
• "Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron: Feminist and Queer Approaches," in Teaching French Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Colette Winn (MLA Approaches to Teaching Series, 2010, in progress).
• “Queering Rabelais,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Rabelais, ed. Floyd Gray and Todd Reeser (MLA, 2010, in progress).
• "Figural Historiography: Dogs, Humans, and Cynanthropic Becomings," in Comparatively Queer, ed. Jarrod Hayes, Margaret Higonnet, and William J. Spurlin (Palgrave, 2010),45-67.
• "Ideological Fantasies," in Capital Q: Marxisms After Queer Theory, special issue of GLQ, ed. Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo (in progress).
• "Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past," in The Blackwell Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/Queer Studies, ed. George Haggerty and Molly McGarry (London and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 192-211.
• "Queer Times." South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3 (2007): 485-493. Special Issue: After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker.
• "The Other Inside," in Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Tranformations, ed. Nancy Chen and Helene Moglen (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, 2006): 114-24.
• "Frère Jacques." PMLA 120.2 (March 2005): 476-477. Forum: The Legacy of Jacques Derrida.
• "Fetishism: Fetishism in Literature and Cultural Studies," in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 2, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005): 826-828.
• "Queer Nation, Female Nation." Modern Language Quarterly 65.1 (March 2004): 29-47. Special Issue: Feminism in Time, ed. Margaret Ferguson and Marshall Brown.
• "Nomads," in Shock and Awe: War on Words, ed. van Eekelen et al. (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, 2004): 104-107.
• "'They are all sodomites!'" Signs 28.1 (Autumn 2002): 453-455. Special Issue: Gender and Cultural Memory, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith.
• "Toward a Psychoanalytics of Historiography: Michel de Certeau's Early Modern Encounters." South Atlantic Quarterly 100.2 (Spring 2001): 365-379. Special Issue: Michel de Certeau--in the Plural, ed. Ian Buchanan.
• "Archives in the Fiction: The Rhetoric of the Law in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron," in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, ed. Lorna Hutson and Victoria Kahn (Yale University Press, 2001), 73-94.
• "Ovidian Subjectivities in Early Modern Lyric: Identification and Desire in Petrarch and Louise Labé," in Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (University of Toronto Press, 2001), 21-37.
• "Louise Labé's Feminist Poetics," in Distant Voices Still Heard: Contemporary Readings of French Renaissance Texts, ed. J. O'Brien and M. Quainton (Liverpool University Press, 2000), 107-122.

Teaching Interests

Early Modern Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Gender and Sexuality
French and Francophone Philosophies of Difference
Humanism in the Making: Animals Before Descartes
Feminist and Queer Theories
Affect
Early Modern Colonial Encounters
Introduction to Theory: Animal Theory