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 in18th-century France, 17th-and 18th-century French art theory and art criticism, gender issues in visual culture, the cultural history of the Ancien Régime and the Revolution, and Enlightenment print culture. 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 CAA and a New York Book Show Award in 2002. She has published numerous essays on 18th-century topics, one of which, "Voice of the Public," won the Clifford Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1990. She is also the translator of Hélène Cixous Perjured City (2003) and the author of essays on Cixous. Of her two current book projects, one focuses on Greuze and paternal authority and the other on the gendered poetics of prerevolutionary art criticism. Her latest essay, "The Greuze Girl: The Invention of a Pictorial Paradigm," was published in French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Philip Conisbee, Studies in the History of Art (Washington D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 2007). Fort is Chevalier dans l'ordre des Palmes académiques. Her research has been supported, among others, by grants and fellowships from the NEH, the Camargo Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, the Lurcy Educational Trust, and the Northwestern University Institute for the Humanities. She received two Distinguished Teaching Awards from Northwestern University. From 1998 to 2004 Fort was editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal Eighteenth-Century Studies. She currently serves as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

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