Modern Languages Professor Stephanie Boulard's new book, Visions Visitations Passions: En Compagnie De Claude Louis-Combet (Corlevour, France) is significant not only for its content, but for Boulard's singular approach to its publication. A three year project, published in December 2008, Boulard directed every aspect of the book's development. She engaged luminary French writers, academics, philosophers, poets, and artists, wrote an introductory analysis and a full length article, self-edited, and developed the book's organization and presentation.

Written in French, Visions is a retrospective on the prolific and multi-dimensional writings of Claude Louis-Combet "" poet, novelist, biographer, historian, philosopher, and a translator of spiritual texts. In gathering together diverse analysis, commentary, and artistic evocations of Louis-Combet's work, Boulard inherently illuminates its extraordinary scope. Louis-Combet contributed four texts written especially for the book, a postscript to Boulard's twenty year correspondence with him.

Boulard undertook the project for conceptual and aesthetic reasons. "I wanted a book that would be literary, but that would also escape the division between disciplines; a book that would not be strictly academic but would offer another kind of reading, which would be a form of wandering, as in a garden "" with poems and visual art."

Available in France and Belgium, Visions has not yet been translated to English.