Marva’s op-ed about the redemptive power of education and travel appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch on April 5, 2021. She has always learned a great deal from her students, but Virgil brought her new understandings about resilience and courage. Here is the text of the op-ed:

My former student, Virgil ...

I was honored to be invited to film an in-depth interview for the  documentary “L’aventure des manuscrits” with the Paris-based documentary film company Little Big Story. Since travel restrictions kept me from Paris, the director, Anne-Sophie Martin, sent a French film crew to Charlottesville from New York ...

After Montblanc invited Marva to create a webinar to celebrate their Victor Hugo Writer’s Edition series of Writing Instruments and Accessories, she invited Les Mis composer Claude-Michel Schönberg to join her.  On September 22, 2020, about 375 people attended this virtual event:

DISCOVER THE INSPIRATION OF VICTOR HUGO’S LES MISÉRABLES

Claude-Michel ...

Marva loves sharing her work on Victor Hugo’s vision for leading lives of love and conscience  with readers around the world! Below you will find a list ...

More than 80 people joined Marva for the virtual launch of To Love Is to Act: Les Misérables and Victor Hugo’s Vision for Leading Lives of Conscience. On July 25, 2020, lovers of reading, fans of the musical Les Misérables, Hugo specialists, and people who strive to live their best ...

Following up on the international Havana, Cuba, colloquium “Victor Hugo, Visionary of Peace,” the Casa Victor Hugo cultural center interviewed several of the Hugo scholars. Here is their interview with Marva in English (the original French version is posted on the Cuba Coopération site).

Read more »

To Love Is to Act: Les Misérables and Victor Hugo’s Vision for Leading Lives of Conscience
Foreword by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, creators of the musical Les Misérables
Chicago: Swan Isle Press,  2020.  Distributed by the University of Chicago Press.
256 pages | 34 halftones | ...

Marva is delighted to continue her exploration of Victor Hugo’s ideas around Les Misérables with a talk on the island of Guernsey, his exile home for fifteen years. Invited to the 2021 Victor Hugo in Guernsey Weekend (in late June),  Marva has Read more »

I was honored to represent the Americas at the Havana, Cuba, international colloquium: Victor Hugo, Visionary of Peace. This colloquium—which brought together for the first time Hugo ...

• Fascinated by the ideals expressed in the musical Les Mis?
• Wonder why people would read such a long novel as Les Misérables?
• Love “Les Misérables” and like to share your ideas?

Those are just a few reasons why you’d enjoy this six-week discussion group around PBS Masterpiece’s upcoming broadcast of the BBC’s ...

“To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”
« Étudier à Paris, c’est être né à Paris! »
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables I, 3, ii

“Not a one of us has the honor of living a life that’s only his.
My life is yours, ...

Students who take “Victor Hugo’s Paris”—my new UVA January-Term course in Paris this winter—will get to know this great city through the eyes and life of one ...

What would it have been like to be the first to read Les Misérables in manuscript, straight from Victor Hugo’s hands as he wrote it? I experienced that excitement vicariously with my talk for the Paris colloquium, “Juliette Drouet, épistolière” in October 2017. (Click here for the program.)

The ...

Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse—The King Has a Good Time—was best known, even during Hugo’s lifetime, as the basis for Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto. Rigoletto is, in fact, pretty much Hugo’s entire play turned into an Italian opera. So it was natural for the Charlottesville Opera to invite me to ...

What an honor and pleasure it was to talk with my friends Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil during their February 22-24 artistic residency at the University of Virginia!  The highlight for me was the chance to sit with them on UVA’s Old Cabell Hall stage and invite them to talk.  ...

A gripping tale of love, conscience, sacrifice and redemption, Victor Hugo’s timeless “Les Misérables” has been made into a movie more than 50 times, including a forthcoming BBC mini-series. But this universal story might be best known through the award-winning stage musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg.

Schönberg and Boublil ...

By Emily Umansky (CLAS/Batten ‘17)

Renowned French historian Gérard Pouchain has curated and edited catalogues for numerous exhibitions ...

Before it was made into over fifty films and an award-winning musical, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was a rampant best seller when it appeared in 1862. And the popular cartoonists who had caricatured Hugo for thirty years leapt at the chance to satirize his epic novel.Read more »

Lundy Khoy’s recent New York Times piece, “Mr. Trump: I Am an Immigrant With a Criminal Record,” touched me. It also frightened me because in Ms. Khoy’s experience, I saw the shadow of Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert.

As all Les Misérables fans know, Javert relentlessly pursues the ex-convict Jean Valjean ...

Soon after Hillary Clinton was reported to have called some Trump supporters “deplorables,” a meme appeared, renaming the ‘Les Misérables´ musical barricade “Les Deplorables.” Next, Donald Trump walked on stage at a Miami campaign event in front of that meme, to the musical’s rousing “Do You Hear ...

 Q&A: DIRECTOR LED UVA CENTER THAT HELPS TEACHING AND LEARNING TAKE FLIGHT

Retiring as executive director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, Marva Barnett will return to teaching Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” next year. (by Anne E. Bromley)

Many longtime professors don’t recall their early education on how to teach at the ...

How ‘Les Misérables’ Can Help You Vote Your Conscience

Isn’t it obvious? Shouldn’t we vote our conscience?

Yes, I realize that “conscience” has become a coded mantra of the #NeverTrump movement. But when I heard in June the exhortation to “vote your conscience,” it made total ...

Hugh Jackman spoke with Marva in January 2015, after his performance in The River at Circle in the Square Theatre, New York. Sharing his thoughts about playing Jean Valjean in Tom Hooper’s 2012 musical film Les Misérables, he is helping Marva explore the power of Hugo’s work for ...

At the Victor Hugo in Guernsey Festival, Marva joins other Hugo specialists for a private tour of Hugo’s Hautville House with Gérard Audinet and for a tour of the island led by Gérard Pouchain in April 2016.

To visit Hauteville House at the official ...

Live Arts Theatre’s Jigsaw Jones interviews Marva about Les Misérables for their winter 2014 production, which Marva saw with the students in her course Les Misérables: From Page to Stage to Screen.

Read more »

Tony Award®-winners Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, creators of the musicals Les Misérables and Miss Saigon (among others), are artists-in-residence at UVa, September 30-October 2, 2014, at Marva’s invitation. In introducing her guests,  Marva explained how the visit came to be: 

When Claude-Michel Schönberg ...

Marva is invited to share her work on Les Misérables with students and faculty at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio on February 21, 2014.  Beginning her talk with the famous line from the musical Les Mis, “To love another person is to see the face of God,” Marva ...

After experiencing with her students Tom Hooper’s 2012 Les Misérables film, she opened the conversation to the wider University community with Les Misérables: Inspirations for Today?, a Flash! Seminar on January 22, 2013, @ 5:00 p.m., with this description:

As Hugh Jackman toured the world promoting ...

Posted: Sunday, December 16, 2012 12:00 am
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Op-Ed by Marva Barnett

“Les Misérables,” that most popular of musicals, comes at last to movie theaters — and on Christmas Day! What could be better than to have this story of love, grace and redemption ...

Timeless themes and values abound in new
‘Les Misérables’ movie

By Jamshid Ghazi Askar, Deseret News
Published: Saturday, Dec. 22 2012 12:00 a.m. MST

Summary
Timeless themes about God, redemption and social justice fill the new film “Les Miserables” — making the epic tale of Jean Valjean just as ...

December 12, 2012
By Anne E. Bromley

The latest version of the popular musical, “Les Misérables,” will open in movie theaters on Christmas Day. Why have more than 60 million people made “Les Misérables” the longest-running musical worldwide? What is it about Victor Hugo’s ...

Marva receives the insignia of chevalier des Palmes académiques in honor of her work in support of French language and culture, especially her work on Hugo.  Gérard Pouchain, agrégé de l’université, chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, du Mérite national et des Palmes académiques, traveled from Paris to ...

Marva is invited to share what she learned about Victor Hugo’s fight for social justice in creating her Victor Hugo on Things That Matter.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Marva in an article about Christie’s 2012 Paris auction of 500 artworks and objects from Victor Hugo’s family

March 30, 2012 7:09 p.m. ET

Victor Hugo, who wrote the famous, often-adapted novels “Les Misérables” and “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” called his visual artworks “random pen strokes thrown ...

OCTOBER 28, 2011
By MARIAN ANDERFUREN, UVAToday

Marva A. Barnett, French professor and founding director of the Teaching Resource Center, and R. Jahan Ramazani, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, are the recipients of the 2011 Thomas Jefferson Awards at the University of Virginia. The awards ...

Marva offers a UVa Flash! Seminar on connections between Hugo’s battle against the death penalty and death-penalty cases today, most particularly the Theresa Lewis execution in Virginia last September 24. 

Discussion will focus on the beginning of Hugo’s modern novella, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, ...

Invited to kick off the “Banquet Hugolien” with the first text, Marva celebrated Victor Hugo’s work with over 20 other Hugo scholars, journalists, and actors at a public picnic in ...

Marva hosts “When Freedom Returns . . .”: Exile for Victor Hugo and Other Engagé Writers,” the Müller Colloquium at the University of Virginia on April 15-17, 2010.  UVa specialists on exiled authors from other cultures join Parisian Hugo biographer Jean-Marc Hovasse and U.S. Hugo ...

On February 18, 2010, Marva gave a talk and signed copies of her Victor Hugo on Things That Matter at the invitationof the Association France-Amériques (9, avenue Franklin Roosevelt, Paris).  The group of French and Americans who attended “Going Beyond ‘Demain, dès l’aube . . . ...

After her Victor Hugo on Things That Matter was published, Marva is invited to join French Hugo specialists at a roundtable and book signing, the Salon du Livre Victor Hugo, at the Musée Victor Hugo in Villequier, France, on February 20, 2010.

UVA Today, November 13, 2009

Victor Hugo’s ideas had a huge impact on his time, and that impact continues today, according to “Victor Hugo on Things That Matter,” a new book from University of Virginia professor Marva Barnett, who teaches in the Department of French.

The ...

November 5, 2009 from the WMRA Blog 

An invitation to think . . .

Charlottesville listener Marva Barnett sent me this reaction to Nina Totenberg’s summation of Wednesday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case POTTAWATTAMIE COUNTY V. MCGHEE.

“What is just? What is ...

Marva leads a workshop in French for Virginia high-school teachers on bringing Victor Hugo’s works to their students: Au-delà de “Demain, dès l’aube . . .”: L’Actualité de Victor Hugo (in English: Beyond “Demain, dès l’aube . . .”: Victor Hugo for Today’s Students).  During this day-long, interactive ...

Marva wins the University of Virginia 2008 Excellence in Faculty Mentoring Award for her “demonstrated excellence and dedication in helping junior faculty members succeed at the University both within and across departments and/or schools.” Read her thoughts about mentoring.

Invited by the Shakespeare Theatre Company to introduce their staged reading of Hugo’s Ruy Blas on December 9, 2007, Marva helped audience members understand why Hugo wrote this play, how theater made Hugo the leader of the French Romantic movement, and why Ruy Blas remains important. Here is a brief excerpt:

Read more »

Marva hosts Québecois singer and songwriter Alain Lecompte in his one-man show HUGO LIVE. 

Through this engrossing concert, Lecompte presents the legendary Victor Hugo with humor and sensitivity.  By ...

At Marva’s invitation, Gérard Pouchain, Professeur agrégé de Lettres modernes, Paris, offers two talks in French « Autour de Victor Hugo » on April 15, 2005, in the Rotunda Lower West Oval Room

November 8-22, 2002
By Sarah Marchetti, UVAToday

As director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, Marva Barnett has given many awards to distinguished faculty. Now she is the one ...