February 9, 2021 | 12-1 PM EST | Register Here

As co-editors of the forthcoming volume New Directions in Flânerie: Global Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge 2021), Kelly Comfort and Marylaura Papalas will first provide a brief history of the geography, genius, and gender of flânerie from its inception in pamphlets and literary texts of the early 1800s, to its representation in more diverse media and genres, including fashion magazines, film, and video games. They will also address the following questions in a discussion with audience members: What are the major challenges to twenty-first-century flânerie? What are creative solutions to these global challenges? How and why is flânerie still a relevant and valid concept—both in theory and in practice—in this millennium?

Kelly Comfort is Associate Professor of Spanish in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech.  A specialist in Latin American literature and transatlantic modernisms, Dr. Comfort has published two books: Cien años de identidad: Introducción a la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX (Georgetown University Press, 2018), an advanced Spanish textbook and Latin American literature anthology, and European Aestheticism and Spanish American Modernismo (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), which examines the changing role of art and the artist during the turn-of-the-century period and considers the multiple dichotomies of art and life, aesthetics and economics, and production and consumption. Her edited volume Art and Life in Aestheticism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008) rethinks the relationship in aestheticism between the aesthetic and the human realms over the past two centuries.

Marylaura Papalas is Associate Professor of French at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina and also serves as book review editor for Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature. She specializes in twentieth-century European avant-garde movements and has published on both Greek and French surrealists. Her article on surrealist fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli is the 2017 recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship in the Field of Foreign Languages. She is currently completing a monograph project on Schiaparelli and the construction of networked identity and femininity in her designs and representations of them in contemporaneous literature and popular media.

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Atlanta Global Studies Center (AGSC)