A Dialogue on Proust’s Time Regained: Fereshteh Priou and Professor Bill Carter Explore the Return to Combray

Event begins at 1pm PT / 2pm MT / 3pm CT / 4pm ET

A Conversation with Professor Bill Carter on Proust’s Final Volume Organized by Fereshteh Priou, Proust Society of Greenwich

William C. Carter is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In 1975, he accepted a position in the Department of Foreign Languages at UAB where he served as chair from 1979-1990. Since 1985, he has been a member of the Proust Research Center at the Sorbonne and a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin Marcel Proust. In 1988, he founded and directed an international celebration of Proust’s novel, Marcel Proust at UAB, that drew national and international media attention. While at UAB, Carter was elected to two terms as president of the Alabama Humanities Foundation.

In 1989, he was awarded the Palmes Académiques by the French government in recognition of his activities promoting French culture and literature in the United States. His other awards include: Prix Servir du Rotary International, 1992, when he was invited to speak at the Paris Rotary Club, which published his lecture in its journal; Winner of the Alabama Association of Teachers of French 1994 Prix d’Excellence “for services rendered to French culture;” named the 1999 Outstanding Foreign Language Teacher: Postsecondary, by the Alabama Association of Foreign Language Teachers; winner of the Alabama Association of Teachers of French 2000 Prix d’Excellence; the Ireland Award for Scholarly Distinction, UAB, 2002; in 2009, he was granted the Alabama Humanities Award given by the Alabama Humanities Foundation; In 2013, he was awarded the Médaille d’Or du Mérite Francophone by the French government for his contributions to Franco-American cultural exchanges.

His biography Marcel Proust: A Life was selected as a “Notable Book of 2000” by The New York Times, a “Best Book of 2000” by the Los Angeles Times, and a “Best Biography of 2000” by the Sunday Times of London. Harold Bloom has written that Carter is “Proust’s definitive biographer” and that his book, Proust in Love is “a marvelous study of the comic splendor of the great novelist’s vision of human eros and its discontents.” In 2000, Carter was invited to participate in a salute to Proust, in the Great Performers series, at Lincoln Center. In 2024, The New York Times listed the Proust biography as one of the best nonfiction books published since 2000. Carter coproduced the award-winning documentary Marcel Proust: A Writer’s Life, that aired nationally on PBS in 1993, and since then in foreign countries. A French and German version aired on ARTE in recent years. His revised and annotated edition of Scott Moncrieff’s and Andreas Mayor’s translation of A la recherche du temps perdu has just been published in six volumes by Yale University Press: Swann’s Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive and The Fugitive, and Time Regained. A companion guidebook to these volumes will be published by Yale University Press in 2026. Carter also edited a collection of interviews with novelist and historian Shelby Foote, Conversations with Shelby Foote, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 1992. He continues to contribute articles on Proust to various books and publications and gives frequent Webinars on Proust. Carter’s website, created by UAB alum Nicolas Drogoul, is http://www.proust-ink.com.

Fereshteh Priou is the founder of the Proust Society of Greenwich. Since 2007, she has led a monthly gathering of Proust enthusiasts dedicated to the close reading of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (“In Search of Lost Time”). The group began its fourth cycle in January 2023 and is currently reading the final volume, with plans to complete it by the end of 2025.