UWM Libraries Research and Course Guides: French: Find Scholarly Resources

Databases for Research in World Languages

Mango Languages
Self-paced language learning modules for over 70 languages.
MLA International Bibliography
MLA International Bibliography indexes international scholarly materials, including over 4,400 journals, books, working papers, and conference proceedings on language, literature, linguistics, and folklore. It is updated 10 times a year.
JSTOR
Provides access to journal articles, books, images, and primary sources. Contents include the Artstor image collection, archival and current scholarly journal content, and historical documents.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
This database abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. The database covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Documents indexed include journal articles, book reviews, books, book chapters, dissertations and working papers.
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Ethnic NewsWatch incorporates both current Ethnic NewsWatch and Ethnic NewsWatch: A History, providing a full-text collection of more than 2.5 million articles from over 330 titles, from 1959 to current. Ethnicities include: African American/Caribbean/African; Arab/Middle Eastern; Asian/Pacific Islander; European/Eastern European; Hispanic; Jewish; Native People.
Humanities International Complete
Humanities International Complete includes all data from Humanities International Index (more than 2,100 journals and 2.47 million records) plus unique full text content. The database includes full text for more than 890 journals.
Project Muse
Provides digital humanities and social sciences content with full text access to 350 journals and select full text access to ebooks. Limit to subscribed full text using the advanced search and selecting, "Only content I have access to". Why can't I access some of this content?
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 7,000 full-text periodicals, including nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 11,000 journals and a total of more than 11,600 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 journals.
WorldCat
WorldCat holds tens of millions of bibliographic records that represent more than one billion items. It encompasses hundreds of languages and all formats, including rapidly growing numbers of electronic resources and digital objects.

Databases for Scholarly Sources in French

Persée
A digital library of open access, mostly French-language scholarly journals, established by the Ministry of National Education of France.
cairn.info
Cairn.info vous permet de consulter en ligne un nombre croissant de publications de sciences humaines et sociales de langue française, en texte intégral. IMPORTANT NOTE: The UWM Library does NOT have a subscription to the contents of this database, but users can still search it and request articles through Inter-Library Loan.
OpenEdition
OpenEdition gathers OpenEdition Books, Revues.org, Hypotheses.org and Calenda, four platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities.
The ARTFL Project
Founded in 1982 as a result of a collaboration between the French government and the University of Chicago, the ARTFL Project is a consortium-based service that provides its members with access to North America's largest collection of digitized French resources. Along with ARTFL's flagship database ARTFL-FRANTEXT, ARTFL members are also given access to a large variety of other Subscriber Databases.
BnF: Bibliothèque nationale de France
The Bibliothèque nationale de France collects, preserves and makes known the national documentary heritage. The BnF’s collections are unique in the world: 14 million books and printed documents, manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps and plans, scores, coins, medals, sound documents, video and multimedia documents, scenery elements... All disciplines, whether intellectual, artistic or scientific, are represented in a comprehensive way. About 150 000 documents are added to the collections each year thanks to legal deposit, acquisitions and donations.
Gallica - Bibliothèque nationale de France
Gallica est la bibliothèque numérique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France et de ses partenaires. En ligne depuis 1997, elle s’enrichit chaque semaine de milliers de nouveautés et offre aujourd’hui accès à plus de 2 millions de documents.

Europeana
Europeana enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. It promotes discovery and networking opportunities in a multilingual space where users can engage, share in and be inspired by the rich diversity of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage.

Érudit
Érudit a pour mission de soutenir la publication numérique ouverte et la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales et en arts et lettres.
SUDOC (Système Universitaire de Documentation)
Le catalogue du Système Universitaire de Documentation est le catalogue collectif français réalisé par les bibliothèques et centres de documentation de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche. Il comprend plus de 13 millions de notices bibliographiques qui décrivent tous les types de documents

Featured books from the collection

A Companion to the French Revolution by Peter McPhee (Editor)
ISBN: 9781118316221
Publication Date: 2012-10-02
A Companion to the French Revolutioncomprises twenty-nine newly-written essays reassessing the origins, development, and impact of this great turning-point in modern history. Examines the origins, development and impact of the French Revolution Features original contributions from leading historians, including six essays translated from French.Presents a wide-ranging overview of current historical debates on the revolution and future directions in scholarship. Gives equally thorough treatment to both causes and outcomes of the French Revolution.
The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture, and Apartheid by Nicolas Bancel (Editor); Pascal Blanchard (Editor); Dominic Thomas (Editor); Alexis Pernsteiner (Translator)
ISBN: 0253026253
Publication Date: 2017-05-01
Debates about the legacy of colonialism in France are not new, but they have taken on new urgency in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. Responding to acts of religious and racial violence in 2005, 2010, and 2015 and beyond, the essays in this volume pit French ideals against government-sponsored revisionist decrees that have exacerbated tensions, complicated the process of establishing and recording national memory, and triggered divisive debates on what it means to identify as French. As they document the checkered legacy of French colonialism, the contributors raise questions about France and the contemporary role of Islam, the banlieues, immigration, race, history, pedagogy, and the future of the Republic. This innovative volume reconsiders the cultural, economic, political, and social realities facing global French citizens today.
The Black Populations of France by Sylvain Pattieu (Editor); Emmanuelle Sibeud (Editor); Tyler Stovall (Editor)
ISBN: 9781496229984
Publication Date: 2022-02-01
The Black Populations of France is a study of Black peoples and their history in France and the French Empire during the modern era, from the eighteenth century to the present. The contributors to this collection explore three main axes. The first addresses circulations—the ways Black populations have moved through the spaces of metropolitan France and the empire—and focuses on the actors themselves and the margins of maneuver available to them, particularly as soldiers, sailors, immigrants, or political militants. The second considers legacies and the ways the past has informed the present, addressing themes such as the memory of slavery, the histories of Black women and gender, and the historical influence of African Americans on Blacks in France. The final axis considers racial policy and the ways the state has shaped racial discourses through the interactions between state policies and ideas of race developed by individuals, organizations, and communities.
Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France: a Comparative Framework by Elaine R. Thomas
ISBN: 1283899248
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Over the past three decades, neither France's treatment of Muslims nor changes in French, British, and German immigration laws have confirmed multiculturalist hopes or post nationalist expectations. Yet analyses positing unified national models also fall short in explaining contemporary issues of national and cultural identity. Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France: A Comparative Framework presents a more productive, multifaceted view of citizenship and nationality. Political scientist Elaine R. Thomas casts new light on recent conflicts over citizenship and national identity in France, as well as such contentious policies as laws restricting Muslim headscarves. Drawing on key methods and insights of ordinary language philosophers from Austin to Wittgenstein, Thomas looks at parliamentary debates, print journalism, radio and television transcripts, official government reports, legislation, and other primary sources related to the rights and status of immigrants and their descendants.
The Jews of Modern France: Images and identities by Zvi Jonathan Kaplan (Editor); Nadia Malinovich (Editor)
ISBN: 9789004324183
Publication Date: 2016-08-11
The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities focuses on the shifting boundaries between inner-directed and outer-directed Jewish concerns, behaviors and attitudes in France over the course of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The End of French Intellectuals by Shlomo Sand
ISBN: 9781786635082
Publication Date: 2018-04-10
Mixing reminiscence and analysis, the author revisits a history of French intellectuals that, from the Dreyfus Affair through to Charlie Hebdo, seems to him that of a long decline. As a long-time admirer of Zola, Sartre and Camus, Sand is staggered to see what the French intellectual has become today, in such characters as Michel Houellebecq, Éric Zemmour and Alain Finkielkraut. In a work that gives no quarter, and focuses particularly on the Judeophobia and Islamophobia of the 'elites', he casts on the French intellectual scene a gaze that is both disabused and sarcastic.
French Scientific and Cultural Diplomacy by Philippe Lane; Laurent Fabius (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781846318658
Publication Date: 2013-05-31
France has long been engaged in a very active cultural and scientific diplomacy. It aims both at ensuring and valorising the international presence of France in the domains of language, culture, communication, or higher education and research. This diplomacy is backed by a network of cooperation services in embassies and cultural institutions, as well as by numerous operators and specialised agencies in various sectors. This book asks whether cultural diplomacy, invented by France in the 18th century, is in danger. It asks whether the present system, aimed at helping artists and creators, professionals of teaching and culture, researchers and intellectuals, can be improved. And it argues that a diplomacy of influence needs coherent foreign policy connecting sectors and promoting partnerships.
From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought by Julian Bourg
ISBN: 9780773531994
Publication Date: 2007-05-14
From Revolution to Ethics demonstrates that intellectuals and activists turned to ethics as the touchstone for understanding interpersonal, institutional, and political dilemmas. In absorbing and scrupulously researched detail Bourg explores the developing ethical fascination as it emerged among student Maoists courting terrorism, anti-psychiatric celebrations of madness, feminists mobilizing against rape, and pundits and philosophers championing human rights.
Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859-1914 and Beyond by Martin S. Staum
ISBN: 9780773585942
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Deals with the dilemmas of early French social scientists inclined to stress either heredity or environment, but forced to concede the influence of both. The prevailing assumption has been that French ethnographers highlighted the cultural and social environment while anthropologists emphasized the scientific study of head and body shapes. Martin Staum shows that the temptation to gravitate towards one pole of the nature-nurture continuum often resulted in reluctant concessions to the other side. Psychologists Théodule Ribot and Alfred Binet, for example, were forced to recognize the importance of social factors. Non-Durkheimian sociologists were divided on the issue of race and gender as progressive and tolerant attitudes on race did not necessarily correlate with flexible attitudes on gender. Recognizing this allows Staum to raise questions about the theory of the equivalence of all marginalized groups. Anthropological institutions re-organized before the First World War sometimes showed decreasing confidence in racial theory but failed to abandon it completely. Staum's chilling epilogue discusses how the persistent legacy of such theories was used by extremist anthropologists outside the mainstream to deploy racial ideology as a basis of persecution in the Vichy era.
Out of the Study and into the Field: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology by Robert Parkin (Editor); Anne de Sales (Editor)
ISBN: 9781845456955
Publication Date: 2010-06-01
Outside France, French anthropology is conventionally seen as being dominated by grand theory produced by writers who have done little or no fieldwork themselves, and who may not even count as anthropologists in terms of the institutional structures of French academia. This applies to figures from Durkheim to Derrida, Mauss to Foucault, though there are partial exceptions, such as Levi-Strauss and Bourdieu. It has led to a contrast being made, especially perhaps in the Anglo-Saxon world, between French theory relying on rational inference, and British empiricism based on induction and generally skeptical of theory. While there are contrasts between the two traditions, this is essentially a false view. It is this aspect of French anthropology that this collection addresses, in the belief that the neglect of many of these figures outside France is seriously distorting our view of the French tradition of anthropology overall. At the same time, the collection will provide a positive view of the French tradition of ethnography, stressing its combination of technical competence and the sympathies of its practitioners for its various ethnographic subjects.

Belles Lettres: manuscripts by the masters of French literature by Roselyne De Ayala; Jean-Pierre Gueno; John Goodman (Translator)
ISBN: 0810906171
Publication Date: 2001-09-01
Belles Lettres compiles the original manuscripts of more than 100 famous French writers from the 13th to the 20th century, and in doing so offers a comprehensive look at the country's major literary and intellectual movements. Scholars and dilettantes alike will delight in the rationalism of René Descartes, symbolist verse of Charles Baudelaire, crystalline prose of Marcel Proust, romantic intrigue of Colette, and stark existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Because many of the manuscripts are rare, this volume--from the editors of Abrams' Brilliant Beginnings and Illustrated Letters--provides the first English translation of several of the works.
A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema by Alistair Fox (Editor); Michel Marie (Editor); RaphaÃ«lle Moine (Editor); Hilary Radner (Editor)
ISBN: 9781118585429
Publication Date: 2014-12-02
A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema presents acomprehensive collection of original essays addressing all aspectsof French cinema from 1990 to the present day. Features original contributions from top film scholarsrelating to all aspects of contemporary French cinema Includes new research on matters relating to thepolitical economy of contemporary French cinema, developments incinema policy, audience attendance, and the types, building, and renovation of theaters Utilizes groundbreaking research on cinema beyond the fiction film and the cinema-theater such as documentary, amateur, and digit.
The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women writ, women writing by Domna C. Stanton
ISBN: 1317035119
Publication Date: 2016-03-23
The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France adds a new dimension to the field of early modern French literary and cultural studies by incorporating dynamic, shifting notions of gender and engaging with contemporary critical theory in an effort to gauge the specifics of textual conformity and resistance to norms. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as practice.
The Essence of Style: how the French invented high fashion, fine food, chic cafés, style, sophistication, and glamour by Joan DeJean
ISBN: 0743264134
Publication Date: 2005-07-05
An exploration of how French culture during the reign of Louis XIV has had an enduring influence on modern traditions and style cites the French origins of such practices as haute cuisine, interior design, and the consumption of celebratory champagne.
France and the Visual Arts Since 1945 by Catherine Dossin (Editor)
ISBN: 9781501341526
Publication Date: 2018-09-20
Taking on the myth of France's creative exhaustion following World War II, this collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars, whose research offers English readers a rich and complex overview of the place of France and French artists in the visual arts since 1945.Addressing a wide range of artistic practices, spanning over seven decades, and using different methodologies, their contributions cover ground charted and unknown.
French Cycling by Hugh Dauncey
ISBN: 9781846318351
Publication Date: 2012-12-15
French Cycling: a Social and Cultural History aims to provide a balanced and detailed analytical survey of the complex leisure activity, sport, and industry that is cycling in France. Identifying key events, practices, stakeholders and institutions in the history of French cycling, the volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how cycling has been significant in French society and culture since the late nineteenth century. Based on a very wide range of primary and secondary sources, the volume aims to present in clear language an explanation of the varied significance of cycling in France over the last hundred years.
French Gastronomy by Jean-Robert Pitte; Jody Gladding (Translator)
ISBN: 0231124163
Publication Date: 2002-03-27
Why did the passion for food -- gastronomy -- originate in France? The key, it turns out, is France itself. In its climate, diversity of soils, abundant resources, and varied topography lie the roots of France's food fame. Pitte masterfully reveals the ways in which cultural phenomena surrounding food and eating in France relate to space and place.