Mary Byrd Kelly


Mary Byrd Kelly
  • Multi-term Lecturer in French

Contact Info

Wescoe Hall, Room 2058
1445 Jayhawk Blvd
Lawrence, KS 66045-7594
Office Hours:
MW 1pm-2pm or by appointment

Biography

Mary Byrd Kelly is a multi-term lecturer who teaches advanced language classes for students majoring or minoring in French.  In recent years she has also been teaching a course in English, open all students, on France and the French.  When not teaching, she enjoys translating works by contemporary French intellectuals and scholars. In 2010 the Toni Morrison Society awarded her a grant to attend its Language Matters Workshop on translation at its biennial conference in Paris.  She has also been the recipient of an NEH grant to attend its Summer Institute in France, “History, Memory, and Dictatorship: The Legacy of World War II in France, Germany and Italy.”

Education

M.A. in French, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1976
B.A. in French, Hollins College, 1974
with Honors

Research

She has translated three books and numerous articles by French scholars and intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut, Tzvetan Todorov, Pascal Bruckner, Christian Delage, and others.

 

Research interests:

  • French language
  • Translation
  • French history and culture

Teaching

Upper-level French language classes, French 152: France and the French

Selected Publications

Book translations

(With Ralph Schoolcraft).  Christian Delage, Caught on Camera: Film in the Courtroom from the Nuremberg Trials to the Trials of the Khmer Rouge, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation:  Reflections on the Question of Genocide, (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

Tzvetan Todorov, A French Tragedy: Summer 1944, Scenes of Civil War, (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1996).

Article translations

Pascal Bruckner, “The Indian Summer of Life,” South Central Review, vol. 37, no. 1, spring 2020, p. 1-13.

Mireille Huchon, “Rabelaisian Encryptions,” Yale French Studies, vol. 134, 2018, p. 51-66.

Pascal Bruckner, “The Communist Tragedy,” South Central Review, vol. 31, summer 2014, p. 1-8.

Marc Dambre, “The Memory of Some French Texts in Les Bienveillantes: The  Explicit and the Implicit,” Yale French Studies, volume 121, summer 2012, p. 169-84.

Pascal Bruckner, “The Ambivalences of Vulgarity,” in South Central Review, vol.24, summer 2007, p. 5-14. 

André Glucksmann, on Pascal Bruckner, in South Central Review, volume 24, summer 2007, p. 26-30. 

Luc Ferry, interview, in South Central Review, vol.24, summer 2007, p. 40-45.

Tzvetan Todorov, preface to François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism, (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. vii-xiv.

Articles

“Saying by Implicature:  The Two voices of Diderot in La Lettre sur les aveugles,” vol. 12, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 231-41.