Sima Godfrey began her university studies at the Université de Lausanne where she completed the “Diplôme d’enseignement du français moderne.”  She subsequently undertook studies in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto where she also completed an M.A. in Comparative Literature.  Following a gap year studying art restoration and museology at the Università Internazionale dell’Arte in Florence, she did her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Cornell University.  From 1978 – 1988 she taught French literature in the Dept. of Romance Languages at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She joined the Dept. of French at UBC in 1988 and in 1998 founded the UBC Institute for European Studies which she directed until 2007. Under her directorship, the Institute organized over 30 conferences and established an interdisciplinary M.A. programme in European Union Studies, the first of its kind in Canada. She retired from UBC at the end of 2021.

Sima Godfrey has published on the usual suspects in 19th-century French literature as well as some unusual ones. Her research interests are wide ranging, from Baudelaire and 19th-century poetics to French fashion and cultural history. Increasingly her work has focused on the historical and cultural contextualisations of French literature and art. Her most recent research focused on the Crimean War and French cultural memory.

Interests

• Discourse of fashionability in modern French culture (19th-20th century)
• French cultural history & French cultural memory (19th-century)
• 19th-century French poetry
• Baudelaire

Books

The Crimean War and Cultural Memory; The War France Won and Forgot. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. (Forthcoming in French with Presses universitaires de Rennes)

Edited Books

With Frank Unger, The Shifting Foundations of Modern Nation States, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

“La Guerre de Crimée n’aura pas lieu.” French Cultural Studies, 27 (1) 2016, 1-17.
https://fhis2015.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2016/05/CrimeeGodfreyArticle.pdf

“Foucault’s Baudelaire.” Foucault on the Arts and Letters, Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century. ed. Catherine Soussloff. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016: 105 – 120.

“Film et (coiffe de) plumes.” Film et plume. eds. Michel Pierssens and Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Toulouse: Du Lérot, 2011. https://fhis2015.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2019/03/Filmes-et-coiffes-de-plumes.pdf

“Le product placement en littérature,” La Réclame, ed. Michel Pierssens and Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Toulouse: Du Lérot, 2010.
Reviewed by Pierre Assouline, “La République des Lettres.” Le Monde,  December 27, 2010.
https://fhis2015.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2019/02/Le-Product-Placement-.pdf

“Concrete Poetry,” Formes urbaines de la création contemporaine, Paris, Formules, 2010: 25 – 44.
https://fhis2015.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2016/05/urbanitesgodfreyarticle.pdf

“Moving through Fashion in 19th-century France.” Performative Body Spaces: Corporeal Topographies in Literature, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts.  ed. Markus Hallensleben, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010: 143-156.

“Du Grand Prix de Rome au grand mépris de Rome,” Les Prix, ed. Michel Pierssens and Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Toulouse: Du Lérot, 2009.
https://fhis2015.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2019/02/Les-Ratés-du-Prix-de-Rome.pdf

“Ce père nourricier.  Revisiting Baudelaire’s Family Romance,” Nineteenth-century French Studies, 38, 1-2, 2009: 39-51.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nineteenth_century_french_studies/v038/38.1.godfrey.html

“Making Sense of The Nineteenth-Century; Alain Corbin, Cultural Historian, French Historical Studies, 25, 2, 2002: 381-398.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/french_historical_studies/v025/25.2godfrey.html

“Charles Baudelaire and Art,” The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 4 vols., 1: 212-217.

“Haute couture, haute culture,” De la littérature française, ed. Denis Hollier, Paris: Bordas, 1993: 715-723.

“The Dandy as Ironic Figure,” SubStance, 11, 3, 1982: 21-33.
https://fhis2015.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2019/05/The-Dandy-as-Ironic-Figure.pdf