Bernadette Fort

Bernadette Fort, Professor of French and Adjunct Professor of Art History, holds an Agrégation in German and a Doctorat in French Literature from the Sorbonne. Her research and teaching interests include literature, culture, and visual arts in 18th-century France, 17th-and 18th-century French art theory and art criticism, the construction of gender in visual culture, and the cultural history of the Ancien Régime and the Revolution. Fort has authored or edited six books: Le Langage de l'ambiguité dans l'oeuvre de Crébillon fils (1978); Fictions of the French Revolution (1991); The Mémoires secrets and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France (co-ed. with J. Popkin, 1998); Les Salons des Mémoires secrets (ed. 1999); Crébillon's Lettres de la Duchesse (ed. 2002); and The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (co-ed. with A. Rosenthal 2001), which won the Historians of British Art Prize of the College Art Association and a New York Book Show Award. She has organized six major colloquia and published numerous essays on 18th-century writers and artists, such as Crébillon, Prévost, Diderot, Rousseau, Falconet, Ch.-N. Cochin, Fragonard, and Greuze, as well as essays on 18th-century visual and print culture, including a prize-winning essay on 18th-century art criticism. Her articles have appeared, among other journals, in Diderot Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, New Literary History, The Romanic Review, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, and Yale French Studies. She translated Hélène Cixous Perjured City (2003) and published essays on Cixous. Of her two current book projects, one focuses on Greuze and the crisis of paternal authority in the Ancien Régime, the other on the gendered poetics of prerevolutionary art criticism. Fort has delivered many invited lectures and keynote addresses in the USA, Canada, France, England, and Germany, including, most recently, the Samuel P. Harn Eminent Chair in Art History Lecture, University of Florida. Awards include grants and fellowships from the NEH, the Camargo Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, the Lurcy Educational Trust, Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, as well as two Distinguished Teaching awards from Northwestern. She is Chevalier dans l'ordre des Palmes académiques. From 1994 to 2004 she led the Northwestern Eighteenth-Century Seminar and, from 1998 to 2004, was editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal Eighteenth-Century Studies. In 2005-2008 she served as elected Vice-President and then President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

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