Marc Blanchard was a professor of Comparative Literature

Comparative literature

Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...

 and Critical Theory

Critical theory

Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

 at the University of California, Davis

University of California, Davis

The University of California, Davis is a public teaching and research university established in 1905 and located in Davis, California, USA. Spanning over , the campus is the largest within the University of California system and third largest by enrollment...

.

Before coming to the UC campus in 1971, Blanchard taught at Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

 and Columbia

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. Though he is trained as a classics scholar, Blanchard's longstanding research interests are in Semiotics

Semiotics

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...

 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 ran a study abroad

Study abroad

Studying abroad is the act of a student pursuing educational opportunities in a country other than one's own. This can include primary, secondary and post-secondary students...

 course in Cuba

Cuba

The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...

, 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.