Professor Dr. Cynthia Nazarian

Biography

Cynthia Nazarian is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University, where she also serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in French. She earned her B.A. magna cum laude in Comparative Literature with a focus on Creative Writing from Columbia University and holds both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her research explores the figurations of violence in early modern French, English, and Italian literature, analyzing how the rhetorics of suffering and brutality shape the sovereignties of the early modern Self and State. Nazarian is the author of 'Love's Wounds: Violence, Politics, Poetry in Early Modern Europe,' published by Cornell University Press in 2016, which investigates the metaphors of violence in early modern texts and how love poetry actively transformed to define and reflect state authority. Her current book project, 'Violent Sympathies: Literature, Sovereignty, and the Hazards of Fellow Feeling,' connects early modern literature with contemporary political theory, addressing the challenges of sympathy and state authority. In addition to her scholarly work, Nazarian has published articles in numerous academic journals and has received various fellowships and awards, including the Distinguished Teaching Award from Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences in 2011-2012.

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