Kat A. Haklin is a specialist of nineteenth-century French literature and visual culture.
She holds a Ph.D. in French Language and Literature from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to arriving at CC, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis where she taught French language, literature, and cultural studies courses for graduate and undergraduate students.
Her research focuses on representations of claustrophobia and enclosed space in nineteenth-century France and examines a range of media-from poetry and prose, to painting and caricature, to fashion and film. She is currently working on her first book, Before Claustrophobia: Enclosed Space in French Literature, 1857-1890. The project investigates how writers Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Émile Zola deploy a new conception of enclosed space in their texts, anticipating the first medical definitions for spatial phobias which emerge during the second half of the nineteenth century in France.
At CC Professor Haklin will teach a special topics course in English, "From Cholera to the Coronavirus: Medicine and Confinement in Modern France." Drawing on medical humanities methods, the course will explore how writers, artists, and filmmakers shape our perception of disease, with special attention paid to the physical and psychological effects of confinement. Works studied will include excerpts from The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), "The Horla" (Maupassant), "The Mask of the Red Death" (Poe), The Plague (Camus), and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Bauby), among other works of fiction, non-fiction, and visual art.
Courses in 2020-2021:
Elementary French I and II
Intermediate French II
From Cholera to the Coronavirus: Medicine and Confinement in Modern France (in English)
