About

Maureen DeNino specializes in nineteenth-century French literature and culture. She teaches French-language courses, as well as courses on “island paradise” in the French cultural imagination and nineteenth-century media and popular culture. Her research explores the relationship between French colonial culture, literature, and the press, with a focus on daily newspapers, illustrated weeklies, and comparative colonialisms across Europe. Her dissertation, “Actualité coloniale: Colonial Literature and the Press, 1877-1898,” is a study of nineteenth-century colonial literature as a product of the daily press and expanding global information networks. She has published articles on scent and parfume in francophone Tahitian literature and on trans-European movement of images of the pétroleuse, the storied women arsonists of the Paris Commune, and is currently working on an article on Pierre Loti’s scandalous account of colonial warfare in Tonkin. Her book project, The Paper Colony, will examine how a late nineteenth-century conman mobilized eighteenth-century representations of Pacific island paradise in order to dupe investors and fund a fraudulent colonial venture, the “colonie libre de Port-Breton.” The Paper Colony will approach the Port-Breton colony as a media affair, situating the scam and subsequent press frenzy in the history of nineteenth-century mediatized scandals more broadly.