“The Topographic Imaginary: Art and the Environs of Greater Paris”
Guest Lecture and Workshops by Dr. Ari Blatt
Tuesday, March 24, 2026, from 5-7:30 p.m.
Plemmons Student Union 417 (Beacon Heights)
BOONE, N.C. — Appalachian State University's Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures — with support from the College of Arts and Sciences Billy and Del Hunt Helton Faculty Excellence Fund and Office of International Programs — invites the public to a free lecture by Dr. Ari Blatt on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at 5 p.m. in Plemmons Student Union 417 (Beacon Heights).
Dr. Blatt is professor and chair of the Department of French at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on modern and contemporary French literature and visual culture. He is the author of Pictures into Words: Images in Contemporary French Fiction (Nebraska, 2012) and co-editor, with Edward Welch, of France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture (Liverpool, 2019). Blatt's most recent book, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography (Liverpool, 2022), is about picturing place. He is currently working on French culture’s fascination for the diagonale du vide, or “empty diagonal,” and has been pondering what it might look like to make the work we do in the humanities less coolly detached and clinical and, instead, more expressly personal.
On March 24, Blatt will give an interdisciplinary lecture that crosses disciplines from literature to fine arts. He touches on literature, photography, walking, and writing as we begin attending to space and place, finding beauty in the banal. Building on The Topographic Imaginary, Blatt encourages us to think about everyday environments — both natural and manmade — at the intersection of image and memory, history, and affect.
Part of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures International Speaker Series, “The Topographic Imaginary: Art and the Environs of Greater Paris” is free and open to the public. For a disability accommodation, visit odr.appstate.edu.
Questions can be directed to the organizers: Dr. Benito Del Pliego (delpliegob@appstate.edu) and Dr. Stephanie Tsakeu Mazan (tsakeumazansd@appstate.edu).
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About the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
The Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures offers courses that enhance students’ understanding of other cultures and languages as well as their own, making them prepared for lifelong learning in a multicultural world. Learn more at https://dllc.appstate.edu.
About the College of Arts and Sciences
The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at Appalachian State University is home to 17 academic departments, two centers and one residential college. These units span the humanities and the social, mathematical and natural sciences. CAS aims to develop a distinctive identity built upon our university's strengths, traditions and locations. The college’s values lie not only in service to the university and local community, but through inspiring, training, educating and sustaining the development of its students as global citizens. More than 6,800 student majors are enrolled in the college. As the college is also largely responsible for implementing App State’s general education curriculum, it is heavily involved in the education of all students at the university, including those pursuing majors in other colleges. Learn more at cas.appstate.edu.
About the Office of International Programs
Appalachian State University combines a strong liberal arts foundation with a comprehensive, pervasive and integrated commitment to global engagement. The Office of International Programs assists App State in fulfilling its global engagement mission by working to develop awareness, knowledge, appreciation and respect of cultural differences — in both domestic and international contexts — in the university’s students, faculty and staff, as well as in the surrounding communities. Learn more at international.appstate.edu.
Dr. Ari Blatt
Dr. Ari Blatt is professor and chair of the Department of French at the University of Virginia. Photo submitted