Professor Ahearn has research interests in many phases of Comparative Literature and 19th and 20th century French literature and poetry, literary theory, and literature and the city. Published February 2010: Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001: European Contexts, American Evolutions (Ashgate Publishing LTD).

Comparative literature; including 19th century French poetry and novel, but including as well some 25 articles on literature in France, England, America and Germany on literature and the city, ecstatic and visionary writing, literature and philosophy, literary theory, Marx's writings in relation to literature.

Interdisciplinary approaches: history, the arts, psychology, political theory, literature and the social sciences, especially urban studies; literature and the city. The larger role of higher education, including a number of articles, in the MLA annual publication Profession and elsewhere; NEH seminars for high school teachers; local and national university/high school collaborative seminars and programs ("Texts and Teachers"). Most recently completed book: Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001: European Contexts, American Evolutions (Ashgate Publishing LTD, February 2010). Link:

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"The Modern English Visionary: Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve," invited contribution to a special number of Twentieth Century Literature, January, 2001.

"Monceau, Camondo, La Curée, L'Argent: History, Art, Evil," commissioned by the editor of French Review for the Millennium issue, 73 (2000): 1100-15.

"Rimbaud, Prophète du 21e siècle: l'amour, l'histoire, l'avenir," in Lire Rimbaud: Approches critiques," ed. Paul Perron and Sergio Villani (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2000), 11-21.

"Historicizing Blake," In-between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism, 8 (1999): 53-57.

"Texts and Teachers": A Model for Collaborative Curricular Development," The High School Magazine, 6 (1999): 248-250.

Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), nominated for the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature Studies.

"The Profession's Responsibility for American Education: A Collaborative Model" (with Arnold Weinstein), Profession '95 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995) 85-88.

"A Marxist Approach to Madame Bovary," in Laurence M. Porter and Eugene F. Gray, eds., Approaches to Teaching Flaubert's Madame Bovary (New York: Modern Language Association of America: 1995), 28-33.

"NEH program is meeting of minds in more ways than one," The Montgomery Journal (Maryland), Sept. 1, 1995.

"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: The Promise of Comparative Literature" (with Arnold Weinstein), in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 77-85.

William Chapman Sharpe, Unreal Cities : Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams, in Modern Philology, 91 (1993): 116-18.

Steve Murphy, Le Premier Rimbaud, ou l'apprentissage de la subversion, in French Forum, 17 (1992): 348-49.

"Blake, Rimbaud, Marx: d'Après le déluge à Soir historique," in Steve Murphy, ed., Rimbaud, cent ans après: Actes du Colloque du Centenaire de la Mort de Rimbaud (Charleville: Musée Rimbaud, 1992), 170-179.

"A Mutual, Joint-Stock World", from Marx and Modern Fiction, published in Ahab (Major Literary Characters), ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers: 1991), 202-209.

"Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself: For a More Direct Use of Marx in Literary Studies," in The Scope of Words: In Honor of Albert S. Cook, ed. Peter Baker et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 361-77.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, French Forum, 25:2 (1990): 248-250.

"Why Marx should be Taught," The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Sunday March 18, 1990 (also in The Palm Beach Post, The Providence Journal Bulletin, The Newport Daily News, The Oregonian, Cedar Rapids Gazette, and The New Haven Register).

"The Magic Cigar Case: Emma Bovary and Karl Marx," in Women's Voices and Figures, from Marie de France to Marie Cardinal, ed. Michel Guggenheim (Palo Alto: Stanford French and Italian Studies, 1989), 181-186.

Marx and Modern Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), nominated for the Harry Levin Prize for the American Comparative Literature Association.

"Explosions of the Real: Rimbaud's Ecstatic and Political Subversions," reprinted in Modern Critical Views: Arthur Rimbaud, ed. Harold Bloom (New Haven: Chelsea House, 1988), 185-194.

"Marx's Relevance for Second Empire Literature: Baudelaire's 'Le Cygne,' " Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 14 (1986): 269-277.

"Simplifier avec gloire la femme: Syntax, Synecdoche and Subversion in a Mallarmé Sonnet," French Review, 58 (1985): 349-359.

"Explosions of the Real: Rimbaud's Ecstatic and Political Subversions," Stanford French Review, 9 (1985): 71-81.

"Using Marx to Read Flaubert: The Case of Madame Bovary," in L'Hénaurme Siècle: A Miscellany of Essays on Nineteenth-Century French Literature, ed. Will L. McLendon (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1984), 73-91.

Rimbaud: Visions and Habitations (University of California Press, 1983).

"Confrontation with the City: Social Criticism, Apocalypse and the Reader's Responsibility in City Poems by Blake, Hugo and Baudelaire," Hebrew Studies in Literature, 10 (1982): 1-22.

"Toward a Model of Ecstatic Poetry: Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' and Rimbaud's 'Villes I' and 'Barbare,' " Modern Language Studies, 12 (1982): 42-58.

N. Osmond, ed., Illuminations, Modern Language Journal, 62 (1978): 200-285.

R.G. Cohn, The Poetry of Rimbaud, Comparative Literature, 29 (1977): 283-285.

"Black Women, White Poet: Exile and Exploitation in Baudelaire's Jeanne Duval Poems," French Review, 51 (1977): 212-220.

H. Peyre, Rimbaud vu par Verlaine, Modern Language Journal, 60 (1976): 306.

"Negative Ecstasy: Experience and Form" in the Jardin public Passage in "La Nausée," in Fiction, Form, Experience, The French Novel from Naturalism to the Present, ed. Grant E. Kaiser (Montreal: Les Editions France-Québec, 1976), 144-153.

"Imagination and the Real: Rimbaud and the City in Nineteenth Century Poetry," Revue de Littérature Comparée, 47 (1973): 522-544.

"The Search for Community: The City in Hölderlin, Wordsworth, and Baudelaire," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 13 (1971): 71-89.

C.A. Hackett, Autour de Rimbaud, French Review, 43 (1970): 515.

Review article on W.M. Frohock's Rimbaud's Poetic Practice and other Rimbaud criticism, Style, 4 (1970): 59-67.

"Entends comme brame and the Theme of Death in Nature in Rimbaud's Poetry," French Review, 43 (1970): 407-417.

J. Plessen, Promenade et Poésie: l'expérience de la marche et du mouvement dans l'oeuvre de Rimbaud, L'Esprit Créateur, 10 (1970): 343-344.

"The Childlike Sensibility: A Study of Wordsworth and Rimbaud," Revue de Littérature Comparée, 42 (1968): 234-256.

"Rimbaud's Images Immondes," French Review, 40 (1967): 505-517.

J. Guillome, ed., "Les Chimères" de Nerval, French Review, 40 (1967): 570-571.

"The Search for Integrity," in Generation of the Third Eye, ed. Daniel Callahan (New York, 1964), 23-30.

"A View from France," The Commonweal, 76 (April 20, 1962): 80-83; and "An Exchange of Views," The Commonweal, 76 (June 22, 1962): 327-328.

"Religious Values in Joyce's Ulysses," The Christian Scholar, 44 (1961): 139-145.

Woodrow Wilson Fellow, 1959

Danforth Fellow, 1959-63

Fulbright Fellow, Aix-en-Provence, France, 1961-62

Scholarship, Bryn Mawr College Inst. des Etudes Françaises d'Avignon, 1963

Junior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois, 1967-68

Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching, 1970

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1977-78

National Endowment for the Humanities College Teachers' Summer Seminar, 1984

National Endowment for the Humanities Secondary Teachers' Summer Seminar, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2003: "The Paris of Balzac, Baudelaire and Flaubert," in Paris and in French

Jacob Ziskind Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature, Brandeis University, Sem. I, 1989-90

Francis Wayland Professor, 1990-95

Co-Director, "Texts and Teachers," NEH grant for interdisciplinary courses at Brown and local and other colleges and high schools, 1992-95; 1997-2000

University Professor, 1995-

The John Row Workman Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities, Brown University, 1997

National Endowment for the Humanities Secondary Teachers' summer seminar, "The Paris of Balzac and Baudelaire," July, 1997, in Paris and in French

National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar for School Teachers, "The Paris of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola," Paris, July 6-August 2, 2003, in Paris and in French

Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities, Wellesley College, 2004-05

Modern Language Association

Interdisciplinary studies of the modern city--literature, film, the social sciences.
18th-20th century literature in France, England, Germany, the United States
Visionary and apocalyptic writing from Blake to the modern age.
Nineteenth century French literature, especially poetry.