Effie Rentzou awarded the title Chevalier in l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques

Effie Rentzou, professor of French and Italian, has been awarded the title of Chevalier in l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. A prestigious decoration awarded by the French Government, the Order of the French Academic Palms honors Rentzou’s contributions to culture and the arts.

According to the American Society of the French Academic Palms, the award “recognizes those who have rendered eminent service” to French education and culture. “[T]his esteemed distinction acknowledges their merits, talents and exemplary activities.”

Rentzou’s scholarship focuses on literature and its relation to other arts, with particular attention to the historical avant-garde movements and modernism. Her most recent book is ”Concepts of the World: French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910–1940" (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and she is the co-editor with her Princeton colleague André Benhaïm, professor of French and Italian, of ”1913: The Year of French Modernism" (Manchester University Press, 2020). She is also the director the Humanities Council’s Program in European Cultural Studies.

Rentzou is the second faculty member of the Department of French and Italian to receive such a decoration in recent years, following Florent Masse’s appointment as Chevalier in the separate Order of Arts and Letters.

Other past Princeton recipients of l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques include David Bellos, the Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and professor of French and Italian and comparative literature; Victor Brombert, the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, Emeritus; Marie-Hélène Huet, the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French and Italian, Emeritus; and François Rigolot, the Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature, Emeritus, and professor of French and Italian, emeritus.