Barry Lydgate
Professor Emeritus of French
Interests: intellectual history of the French Renaissance; confessional writing; post-war Paris; exploring the power of interactive media to teach language and culture.
Autobiographical and confessional narratives were another focus of my teaching, one I revisited in 2023 in Books of the Self (FREN 217), which examined autoécriture, asking what happens to literary structure when the teller of a tale is also its principal subject. The subject of my course Saint-Germain-des-Prés
After a year studying at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm) in Paris and stints as Carnegie Teaching Fellow at Yale and Dean of Branford College, one of the Yale residential colleges, I came to the Wellesley French Department in 1973, receiving tenure in 1980. A specialty from my first days of teaching was our beginning course in language and culture, FREN 101-102. I co-authored the online multimedia program French in Action, which was taught in that beginning course for nearly 30 years. Developed by Wellesley and Yale with major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, French in Action pioneered the concept of the “flipped classroom” in which course content is structured for delivery online, freeing up students' time with the instructor for discussion and practice, and anticipating the needs of distance-learning imposed by the recent pandemic.
I was chair of the French Department from 2011-2015, and served several times as director of Wellesley-in-Aix, the college’s study abroad program in Aix-en-Provence, France. For many years I was campus liaison officer for the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and chair of the college committee that supports Wellesley students for Rhodes, Marshall, Mitchell and Churchill scholarships and Watson Fellowships.
I’m a dedicated cyclist, cook, music-lover, traveler and oenophile. Mention of my three children and, so far, five grandchildren may seem an afterthought in the context of an academic profile, but I love them more than anything else in life.
Education
- B.A., Yale University
- M.Phil., Yale University
- Ph.D., Yale University