Marc Blanchard

Marc Blanchard was a professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis.

Before coming to the UC campus in 1971, Blanchard taught at Yale and Columbia. Though he is trained as a classics scholar, Blanchard's longstanding research interests are in Semiotics and the Critique of Culture.

His articles and books include, La Révolution et les Mots, Description: Sign, Self, Desire: Critical Theory in the Wake of Semiotics, In Search of the City and Trois portraits de Montaigne. He has published more than seventy articles in major journals on topics of Theory, European, Latin American, Caribbean and especially Cuban Literature.

He has lectured at New York University (NYU), CCNY, UNC Chapel Hill, Stanford, the Ruhr Universitaet, Bochum, Germany and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984.

Blanchard also runs a study abroad course in Cuba, one of the few programs in the country which go to this embargoed country. Students must file special waivers through the U.S. State Department. Blanchard and Raquel Scherr created and taught a program entitled Americans in Paris, a month-long program in Paris run through the UC Davis Summer Abroad program. The program educated hundreds of students and was last taught by Blanchard/Scherr in 2008.

Marc Blanchard died on November 8, 2009 after a long battle with cancer.