Andrea Frisch is Professor of French and Core Faculty in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. She previously taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at the University of Southern California, and has held guest professorships at Northwestern University and the Leibniz Universität Hannover.

Frisch’s research is focused on the relationship between historiographical and literary works in the social, cultural, and political context of the Reformation in early modern France. Her first book, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (U of North Carolina P, 2004), examines the links among the witness of the law courts, the figure of the witness in theological writings, the eyewitness narrator of travel literature, and the use and representation of the witness-as-narrator in literary texts. Frisch’s second book, Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh UP, 2015), is a study of the role of conceptions of tragedy and the tragic in the rhetoric of reconciliation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French historiographical and theatrical works about France’s Wars of Religion (1562-1598).

Frisch’s HIAS project examines the relationship between news and historiography about the French Wars of Religion in the 16th- and 17th-centuries. The age of the Reformation and the American Encounter marks a critical moment in which ‘history’ and ‘memory’ were beginning to be seen as fundamentally divergent types of discourse, not just in France, but across Western Europe. The Rise of Unmemorable History traces the conditions under which ‘news’ was assimilated to or excluded from ‘history’, with particular attention to early modern conceptions of the ‘memorable’ and the ‘true’.

Her collaboration partner is Markus Friedrich, professor for Early Modern History at Universität Hamburg.

Andrea Frisch‘s HIAS Fellowship is funded by the ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS.