Sylvie Romanowski

Sylvie Romanowski (Ph. D., Yale, 1969) specializes in the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is also interested in the field of women's studies. She is the author of L'illusion chez Descartes: la structure du discours cartésien (1974), and Through Strangers' Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France (2005), which contains chapters on Montaigne, Montesquieu, Graffigny, Voltaire, and Claire de Duras. She has also written on Malraux, Cyrano de Bergerac, Molière, Racine, Rousseau, Colette, and Ernaux. She is currently working on a translation of Alexander von Humboldt's Géographie des plantes (1807) and on a plate that accompanies that volume. She teaches the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly novels and theater, from a perspective that combines studying literary form and style with situating these works in their historical, social, and philosophical context. She also teaches writing done by women in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries from a similar multi-layered perspective. She is a member of the North American Society for French Seventeenth-Century Literature, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Modern Language Association.

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