In Memory: Professor Emerita Madeleine Cottenet Hage
October 19, 2021
The French department remembers Dr. Hage
It is with sadness that the Department of French and Italian and the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures announce the passing of Professor Emerita Madeleine Cottenet Hage on June 17, 2021. Madeleine Hage was educated in France, earning a doctorate at the Université de Nancy with a dissertation on playwright Jacques Audiberti. Previously she received the agrégation in English literature. (The agrégation is a highly competitive degree which is a gateway to university teaching.) She joined her husband, sociologist Professor Jerrald Hage, in Madison, Wisconsin where she taught at the university for several years before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland in the Department of French and Italian in 1979.
While Madeleine Hage’s early interest was in modern French theater, she later expanded on that field with a book on surrealist woman writer, Gisèle Prassinos. In 1988, Editions Jean Michel Place published her Gisèle Prassinos ou le désir du lieu intime. Among the first on campus to teach film, she broadened her teaching and scholarly expertise to include Francophone literature. It was in the latter context that she initiated and promoted the hiring of renowned Caribbean writer, Maryse Condé. A strong believer in collaborative work, Madeleine Hage co-authored or edited eight volumes including, to mention only three, Penser la créolité with Maryse Condé (Karthala, 1996), De Marie de France à Marie Ndaye: Dictionnaire littéraire et répertoire bibliographique des femmes écrivains de langue française with Christiane Makward (Karthala, 1996) and Daughters of Sarah: Jewish Women Writers Writing in French with Eva Sartori (Holmes and Meier, 2006, finalist National Jewish Book award). Her thirty-five articles and book reviews spanned all the fields of study mentioned above.
Madeleine Hage’s intellectual commitment to connecting across disciplinary boundaries meant that she became one of the early affiliate faculty members of what was then the Women’s Studies program, now a department. Together with a colleague, she participated in the Curriculum Transformation Program whose goal was to enhance existing curricula with scholarship by and about women. In the early 1990s, the Comparative Literature Program (then an independent unit) invited her to join its faculty with a ¼ appointment. Among the distinctions Madeleine Hage received in the course of her career were the campus-level Distinguished Scholar-Teacher award and, from the French government, the Palmes académiques.
Unstinting of time spent with her students, graduate and undergraduate alike, Madeleine Hage headed up the departmental team responsible for training teaching assistants. It was in that capacity that she co-wrote with colleague Pierre Verdaguer a French language textbook which appeared in multiple editions. Colleagues remember Madeleine Hage as, in many ways, the heart and soul of the Department of French and Italian during the twenty-two years she served on the faculty. Throughout her career, she remained firmly committed to the concept and practice of collaborative learning and research. She retired in 2001.
Retirement did not mean repose. Madeleine Hage embarked on a series of projects including translation and interpreting for the legal firm Jones Day on behalf of refugees and the publication of Le Cri (The Scream), a work reflecting the anxiety she experienced when, as a child during World War Two, her family’s hiding place was nearly bombed (mistakenly) by American forces. What she viewed as the most significant achievement in her post-university career, however, was the founding of a book group, hosted in the Connie Morella Library in Bethesda, dedicated to the discussion of contemporary francophone writing. Eventually, given the high numbers these discussions drew, the group divided into two with Madeleine Hage leading discussions twice monthly. Active in this capacity from 2007 until 2021, Madeleine Hage brought to the reading group of thirty-five her skills, talents and commitment to a philosophy of learning-in-community coupled with her belief in the vital importance of cross-cultural understanding.
- Dr. Mel Scullen, Chair, Department of French and Italian