Emily Wieder sums up her research in six words: “Women surrealists who resisted the Nazis.”
Wieder, a third-year doctoral candidate in the French and Francophone World Studies program is a recipient of the 2024 Stanley Award for International Research. In the fall, Wieder will travel to Paris to conduct archival research for her dissertation.
Wieder will examine correspondence between women surrealist artists in the form of letters and postcards to investigate how these surrealist women engaged in political resistance against Nazism during World War II.
This type of archival research can prove difficult due to the lack of available information.
“It can be a little bit tricky once you get into the World War II era because so much was censored,” Wieder explains. “People who were exchanging letters would often be really brief, or cryptic.”
However, Wieder hopes to uncover the specific ways that women surrealist artists like photographer Claude Cahun were engaging in resistance against Nazism.
“The archives for the resistance would have more explicit details about what certain people were doing in terms of how they were resisting,” Wieder says. “Sometimes resistance looked like people shuffling papers back and forth, hiding them, or fabricating passports and other identification papers.”
Wieder describes how women tended to be successful actors in the resistance movement because authorities rarely suspected women to play such roles. In addition, Wieder argues that the framework of surrealism and its insistence on freedom of expression, largely position this genre as poised for resistance against fascism.
“The definition of surrealism, if you go back to the manifesto of 1924, is pure psychic automatism,” Wieder says. “It's this expression of the unconscious, with no filters, which carried over into (the surrealists’) political stance.”
In Paris, alongside conducting archival research, Wieder will present at the International Society for the Study of Surrealism’s annual conference.
Bringing a surrealist philosophy into the classroom
As a French language teacher, Wieder strives to bring the tenets of surrealism into the classroom as a framework for her pedagogy.
“It's okay to have rules around literature, but it's also okay to break them.” Wieder says. “We can take risks. We can be creative. We can make mistakes.”
Wieder accepts and encourages risk-taking and mistake-making as essential aspects of language learning, as well as foundations of surrealism.
“It’s that experimental attitude. We see what works, we see what doesn't, and then we keep what works,” Wieder describes.
Alongside teaching French at Iowa, Wieder also spent a year teaching English in France through an exchange program with the University of Iowa’s French Department and the University of Pau in Pau, France. Wieder turns to her own experiences learning a second language to connect with her students.
“Sharing your own experience makes it a lot easier for the students to accept theirs,” Wieder says. “The main takeaway is that it was okay for me as the instructor to say, ‘I totally understand why you're struggling because I went through the same thing’. Building connection by letting them know that I didn't get it on the first try either.”
Overall, Wieder encourages everyone to learn a second language.
“Learning any second language is one of the best things that anybody can do because it opens up your ability to explore the world and interact with people in real time,” Wieder says.
“Language learning encourages people to build relations and be human in a world where it's easy to have everything be so artificial.”
One day, Wieder hopes to teach a class on the poetry of women surrealists.
“I think poetry is the best form of literature,” Wieder says. “With poetry you can play more with language, and you can learn so much about French history by studying the surrealist movement. So, I think it's a topic that invites interdisciplinarity.”
As 2024 is the centennial year for surrealism, it is a historic moment for Wieder to engage and present her research.