Cancelled Confessions is considered to be surrealist Claude Cahun’s masterpiece. Published in 1930, it defied description (and still does). Showcasing the remarkable photomontages that Cahun created with their lifelong partner, Marcel Moore, this kaleidoscopic epic reveals Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of their time. The revised translation by Susan de Muth is newly introduced by art historian Amelia Groom. The book’s nine sections are prefaced by dreamlike photomontages which reflect, illuminate and converse with the verbal content.

On Thursday, October 17 at 6pm, join literary scholars Hannah Freed-Thall and Juno Jill Richards as they discuss this extraordinary and overlooked project. Excerpts from Cancelled Confessions will be read by NYU PhD students Helen Fishman and Audrey Rogulski.

The conversation will be in English. This event is free with RSVP. Click here for tickets.

JUNO JILL RICHARDS is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University. They are the author of The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes and co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism.

HANNAH FREED-THALL is Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at NYU. She is the author of Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons and Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism.

AUDREY ROGULSKI is a PhD student working on the circulation of Francophone theatre in the United States in the 20th century and today.

HELEN FISHMAN is a writer and PhD student at work on a history of a marvelous trans woman born in the 17th century in France. To make this project happen she is researching everything from Toulousain interiors in the 1600’s, to family dynamics, grief and friendship.