John T. Booker

Professor Booker’s teaching and research focus on the French novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more broadly on the evolution of narrative forms, particularly first-person narration (novel, autofiction, and autobiography), from the nineteenth century to the present, including the current renewal of interest in more traditional and popular forms of storytelling. He teaches graduate courses on the French novel from La Princesse de Clèves to the twentieth century; the nineteenth-century French novel; the Romantic period; first-person novel and narration; and narrative explorations, from Balzac to the New Novel. He has directed dissertations on Stendhal, Dumas, Gide, Colette and Beauvoir, Mauriac, Annie Ernaux, and the New Novel, as well as on topics based on novels such as La Princesse de Clèves, Les Egarements du cœur et de l’esprit, Eugénie Grandet, Le Lys dans la vallée, Le Docteur Pascal, and Journal d’un curé de campagne. He is currently directing a dissertation on Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.

Professor Booker has been recognized for excellence in teaching both within the department—the Jessie Marie Senor Cramer and Ann Cramer Root Award for meritorious teaching and/or research, the Center for Teaching Excellence award at the Graduate level—and University-wide: twice named an Outstanding Educator by the Mortar Board Society, he has also received the Burlington Northern Award for Outstanding Classroom Teaching and a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Excellent Teaching.

Professor Booker co-edited, with Professor Allan Pasco, The Play of Terror in Nineteenth-Century France (U of Delaware Press, 1996), a collection of work originally presented in the form of papers at the Nineteenth Century French Conference held at the University of Kansas. He has published articles on Constant, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Gide, and Mauriac, and has contributed to the MLA Approaches to Teaching volumes on Balzac’s Old Goriot and George Sand’s Indiana. In recent years he has presented papers at national conferences on George Sand, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Annie Ernaux, and Camille Laurens.

Over the course of his career, Professor Booker has served at various times as vice-president and president of the Kansas chapter of the American Association of Teachers of French, as reader and consultant for the Advanced Placement Test in French, and as adviser to the University of Kansas chapter of Pi Delta Phi (French National Honors Society.