William C. Carter

Distinguished Professor of French. Ireland Award for Scholarly Distinction 2002. Specialist in Proust Studies and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature. Project Director for Marcel Proust at UAB, 1988, which was featured on National Public Radio’s “Performance Today.” Palmes Académiques awarded by the French government in 1989. Inducted into Alabama Arts Hall of Fame, 1990. Prix Servir du Rotary International de Paris, 1992 Winner of the Alabama Association of Teachers of French 1994 Prix d’Excellence “for services rendered to French culture” 1994 and 2000. Named the Outstanding Foreign Language Teacher: Postsecondary by the Alabama Association of Foreign Language Teachers for 1999. He served as project director and coproducer for a prize-winning documentary, Marcel Proust: A Writer's Life, which aired nationally on PBS in 1993. This involved adapting works by Proust as well as selecting music, photography, and other archival material to tell the story of Proust's life. His book, The Proustian Quest, was selected by CHOICE as an “Outstanding Academic Book of 1993. His recent biography, Marcel Proust: A Life (Yale University Press, 2000), was selected by The New York Times Book Review,The Los Angeles Times, and the Sunday Times (London) as one of the best books of 2000. Harold Bloom in Genius calls Carter’s biography the “definitive” one. This biography was also selected by Foreword Magazine as “The Book of the Year” 2000 in the non-fiction category. That same year Professor Carter was invited by PEN America to be part of a special tribute to Proust at Lincoln Center. Carter is frequently interviewed and consulted on Marcel Proust by the national and international media, print, radio, and television. He is a member of the editorial board of the Proust journal Bulletin Marcel Proust and a permanent correspondent of the Proust Research Center at the Sorbonne. Carter’s most recent books are Proust in Love and The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren: Proust’s Swedish Valet, both published in 2006 by Yale University Press.