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This article examines the role of the public humanities in France during Covid-19 for self-preservation, coping with isolation, understanding an upended world, creating a sense of connection and belonging, and cultivating empathy for others. For instance, in dealing with the existential angst of confinement and economic woes, one of the novels that resonated the most in France and globally was Albert Camus's The Plague. At the very moment that France enforced measures to restrict access to places of culture, many French people turned to the humanities for comfort and perspective. The pandemic accelerated the need for libraries, galleries, bookstores, museums, concert halls, opera houses, theaters, cinemas, and nightclubs, as well as places of dialogue like cafés and bistros. Dialogue and the cocreation of physical and virtual communities were needed as the spread of false information relating to science, vaccines, and nation exacerbated pre-pandemic divisions in French culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses world languages and their relation with translation and interpreting studies. Topics discussed include bridge communities that break cultural and communication barriers, interpreting skills into disciplines including law enforcement, and the Operation Educate program that was initiated by a criminal justice professor.

Albert Memmi's intellectual nomadism, especially in two very different novels, echoes his preoccupations with Muslim and Jewish relations. His romanticized ancestral novel departs from characteristic somber themes of forced displacement, self-exile, nomadism, and interreligious malaise during a warring twentieth-century marked by the explosive intersections of world and colonial wars along with the birth of new states bordering the Mediterranean Sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]