#  France and the World Seminar (Mahindra Humanities Center) Presents: “Claude Cahun’s Curiosity,” Hannah Freed-Thall (NYU) 

 



    ![freed-thall](/sites/g/files/omnuum8296/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-08/Screenshot%202025-08-28%20at%2011.41.07%E2%80%AFAM.png?itok=_rEqiBrg) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **September 23, 2025** 

 05:00PM - 06:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center 133**  



 

 



 

France and the World Seminar (Mahindra Humanities Center) Presents: “Claude Cahun’s Curiosity,” Hannah Freed-Thall (NYU)

This talk explores the anti-fascistic potential of curiosity, taking avant-garde artist Claude Cahun as a case study. In 1930, Cahun and their partner Marcel Moore published *Cancelled Confessions —* a genre-exploding anti-memoir, alt-Surrealist collage experiment, and visual-verbal remapping of the genderqueer body. In place of Surrealism’s libidinal fixation on woman-as-muse, *Cancelled Confessions* offers up trans/queer curiosity as its edgy, wayward ethos. Hannah Freed-Thall will discuss how Cahun and Moore’s fierce defiance still speaks to us today.

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Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is the author of *Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism* (Oxford UP, 2015), which was awarded the Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies and the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book, and *Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons* (Columbia UP, 2023), which received the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.

Location & Time: Barker Center 133, September 23, 5-6:30 pm



 

 



 

 

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