Overview
Nicholas Huelster is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell where he recently received his PhD in French Literature. Before Cornell, he studied French and Francophone Studies, Humanities, Media and Cultural Studies and had a concentration in Critical Theory at Macalester College in his hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota. He also studied in Paris at the Centre Parisien d'Études Critiques and with the Collège International de Philosophie. He is continuing his research project begun in his dissertation ("Skeptical Poiesis: Montaigne, Rimbaud"), which proposes a skeptical literary structure that resonates between the essays of Montaigne and Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic writing. He continues to theorize the skeptical Pyrrhonian Crisis from its emergence in Early Modern French literature through its subterranean presence through the French 19th century and through to our contemporary moment. He is at heart a creative writer, and brings this zeal for literary practice to his teaching, in his French language and literature classes and in his First Year Writing Seminar, "French Film: 1895 to the Present.” He created his current FWS, “Short Stories: Apocryphal Cycles,” to explore authors who have invented their own (apocryphal) towns, counties, and communities where they set their short story cycles, supporting his students’ academic and creative writing growth as he writes his own “apocryphal cycle.”