Julia Abramson

E-mail: jabramson@ou.edu
Office: Kaufman Hall, Room 217
Phone:405/325-1552

Associate Professor of French Julia Abramson (B.A. Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D. Princeton University) teaches seminars and directs research on the literature and culture of the Enlightenment and Classical eras, on French film, and on food and culture. Abramson's cross-disciplinary research explores topics at the intersections of literary, historical, and cultural domains. Her book Learning from Lying: Paradoxes of the Literary Mystification (University of Delaware Press, 2005) opened a new line of inquiry into the Enlightenment by arguing that the pursuit of les lumières was complicit with deception in the eighteenth century. Working with case studies from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the book shows the ways in which deception combined with secular revelation both to further the aims of Enlightenment and to interrogate their limits. At present, Abramson is pursuing research on food culture and its representations in the French and western European contexts. In this area, her publications include the following titles: “Grimod’s Debt to Mercier and the Emergence of Gastronomic Writing Reconsidered” (EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, 2001), "Legitimacy and Nationalism in the Almanach des Gourmands" (JEMCS: The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2003), the articles "Grimod de la Reynière" and "Carl Friedrich von Rumohr" in Culinary Biographies (2006), and "Deciphering La Vraye mettode de bien trencher les viandes" (Authenticity: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, forthcoming 2006).