Timothy Scheie
Associate Professor of French
Fulbright Advisor
BIOGRAPHY
Timothy Scheie has been a faculty member in the Humanities Department at the Eastman School of Music since 1994, serving as department chair from 2005-2011, and again in 2021. He researches performance and identity in French and American performance, and has authored a book-length study on the place of theater and performance in the writings of Roland Barthes. More recently his research bears on the intersection of national cinemas and film genres. His articles may be found in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Screen, Studies in French Cinema, French Forum, and College Literature, among other journals, and he regularly presents his research at national and international conferences.
At the Eastman School of Music he offers courses on American and French cinema, performance art and avant-garde theater, and French theater of the opera repertoire, and he is also an affiliate faculty member in the Program for Visual and Cultural Studies in the University of Rochester’s College of Arts and Sciences. At the Eastman School of Music he is on the steering committee for the Musical Arts honors major, and teaches an undergraduate research seminar that he designed for this program. He also teaches French language courses at all levels.
Professor Scheie is an advocate for the study of modern languages and cultures. He has conducted workshops for new department chairs and organized panels on current issues and challenges in the field. In 2012 he served on the Modern Language Association (MLA) Steering Committee on New Structures for Languages in Higher Education. He is a founding member of the Association of Departments of Foreign Language’s (ADFL) consultancy service, which has now served over 100 colleges and universities in developing and restructuring programs in modern languages, literatures and cultures. In 2013 he was elected president of the ADFL, an organization of approximately 1000 member departments.
He earned a BA in French from Saint Olaf College (Phi Beta Kappa, with distinction), where he also studied voice and performed with the college choir under the direction of Sir Neville Marriner, Robert Shaw and other conductors in venues including Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, and the Kennedy Center. He received and MA and PhD in French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an award-winning instructor, and pursued additional studies in Paris, Avignon, and Perugia. He was the Albert Markham postdoctoral fellow, and has had residencies, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, at Northwestern University (1995) and Princeton University (2002). Prior to his appointment at the Eastman School he taught at the University of Oregon and in Paris. At the Eastman School, in addition to his role as a French Professor he also serves as Director of Foreign Language Instruction and Fulbright Program Advisor.
WORKS AND PUBLICATIONS
Book
Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and Theatre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Articles
“Cowboy and Alien: the Bardot Western.” Studies in French Cinema (19.2), 2019: 103-121. Published online January 24, 2018: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DWwWHM7Y7dGTrBCRHpIs/full.
“Literature and the Global Studies Curriculum: Perspectives from the MLA/ADFL Consultancy Service.” ADFL Bulletin (44:2), 2018: 63-68.
“Chez nous on the Range: Language, Genre and the Vernacular French Western (1956-1961).” Screen 57:3 (autumn 2016): 316-335.
“Genre in Transitional Cinema: ‘Arizona Bill’ and the Silent French Western 1912-1914.” French Forum 36:2-3 (spring & fall 2011): 201-219.
“Roland Barthes and the Myth of a National Theater.” French Forum 30.2 (spring 2005): 79-96.
Reprinted in Roland Barthes: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Ed. Neil Badmington. London & New York: Routledge. 2010.
“Staging Decolonization: The Theater of Aimé Césaire.” Scholarly chapter in the reader The Francophone World: Cultural Issues and Perspectives. Ed. Michelle Beauclair. New York: Peter Lang, 2003: 103-119. New edition forthcoming 2022.
“Trouble Child: Barthes’s Imagined Youth.” In Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young. Ed. Ron Strickland. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002: 123-139.
“Performing Degree Zero: Barthes, Body, Theater.” Theatre Journal 52.2 (May 2000): 161-181.
Reprinted in Roland Barthes, 3 vols. Ed. Mike Gane and Nicholas Gane. Sage Masters in Modern Social Thought series. London: Sage Publications, 2003.
“Acting Gay in the Age of Queer: Pondering the Revival of The Boys in the Band.” Modern Drama 41.2 (Spring 1999): 1-15.
“Addicted to Race: Performativity, Agency, and Césaire’s A Tempest.” College Literature 25.2 (June 1998): 17-29.
Reprinted in French Cultural Studies: Criticism at the Crossroads. Eds. Marie-Pierre LeHir and Dana Strand. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000: 205-219.
“‘Questionable Terms’: Shylock, Céline’s L’Eglise, and the Performative.” Text and Performance Quarterly 17.2 (April 1997): 153-169.
“Body Trouble: Corporeal ‘Presence’ and Performative Identity in Cixous’s and Mnouchkine’s L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves.” Theatre Journal 46 (March 1994): 31-44.
“Georges Lavaudant.” Theatrical Directors: A Biographical Dictionary. Eds. John Frick and Stephen Vallillo. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994: 230-31.
“Barthes’s Lover as Spectator: Towards a Theater of Jouissance.” Essays in Theatre/Etudes théâtrales 10.2 (May 1992): 180-188.