Hélène Huet

Hélène Huet talking about Mapping Decadence.

Originally from Lille, France, I first came to the US in in 2005-2006, when I served as a teaching assistant at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

I hold a Ph.D. in French and Francophone studies from Penn State University (May 2015), and my dissertation is entitled “Le livre décadent : éditer, illustrer, lire” (“The Decadent Book: Publishing, Illustrating, and Reading”). My research interests include Decadent literature as well as nineteenth-century French literature and history more broadly, the history of the book and publishing, bibliophiles, “livres de collection”, history of cosmetics, and digital humanities.

For the academic years 2013-2015, I worked as the Digital Scholarship Services Graduate Assistant in the Publishing and Curation Services at the Penn State Library, where I was involved with different projects, including: organizing a series of workshops on publishing tools and leading one on Scalar; creating guides on best practices for data management; and providing support for ScholarSphere User Services as well as digital collections  I was also managing editor of the blog,  100 Digital Discoveries.

Since August 2015, I am the European Studies Librarian at the University of Florida. In this position, I help develop the collections of the UF libraries for French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. In addition to acquiring books and other materials that have been suggested to me, I strive to ensure that the UF’s Libraries’ collections in my areas are world-class. Another one of my responsibilities involves helping students and faculty find the perfect sources and resources for their research projects. I also provide library instruction on a wide range of topics to undergraduate and graduate students, and even faculty. Finally, I collaborate with professors and instructors to design both digital pedagogy and research projects.

As the Chair of the Collection Development Working Group of the Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections (CIFNAL), I am currently overseeing the creation of a list of French and Francophone Digital Humanities projects. This list showcases the various digital projects on which scholars are working in the US as well as in France and Francophone countries and helps foster new collaborations between scholars and institutions.

And last but not least, I am the Vice-Chair of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium (FLDH), which is a collective of institutions in the State of Florida that seeks to promote an understanding of the humanities in light of digital technologies and research.

Lucy After a Long Day

I relocated to Gainesville, Florida in 2015, where I now live with my partner, historian, educator, writer, and podcaster Sean Trainor and my cat Lucy.

You can find me on Twitter at @superHH, as well as on LinkedIn.