I am Professor of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth, an Ivy League university in the United States, where I have taught since receiving my PhD from Princeton in 1986.   The focus of my work as a scholar and a teacher is resurrecting the works and voices of French women writers primarily from the early modern period and putting them in dialogue with those of their contemporaries and their historical and cultural context.  I interrogate the effect women's actions have had on the cultural field in general, and analyze how and why the historical record has been constructed to erase this influence.    I am the author of Revising Memory:  Women's Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (Rutgers UP 1990) and Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France:  Mastering Memory (Ashgate 2006), editor of Options for Teaching Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers (MLA 2011) and co-editor with Katherine Ann Jensen of Approaches to Teaching The Princess of Clèves (MLA 1998), and co-editor with Kathleen Wine of Intersections:  Actes de Dartmouth, Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Conference of the North American Society of Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Gunter Narr Publishing 2005).

     In 2013 I was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to complete my book, Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal:  François Bernier, Marguerite de La Sablière and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France (U of Toronto Press 2018).  In that work I explore how one particular salon served as the focal point for the encounter between France and India during France's Grand Siècle and the effect of this encounter on early Enlightenment thought, material culture, and on literature.  A French edition, revised, augmented, updated, and reoriented for a French public, was published in 2024 by Les Belles Lettres, Paris.  Versailles à la rencontre du Taj Mahal:  Conversations éclairées sur l'Inde au temps du Roi-Soleil, translated by Patrick Graille, builds on my previous work and makes it accessible to a new public.  I have published dozens of articles on early modern French culture addressing, among other subjects, salon culture, the art of conversation, the development of the novel, feminist approaches to scholarship, Molière, Corneille, the construction of literary history, memory, and the history of France's encounter with India during the early modern, precolonial period.  I have lectured on these topics and others, in French and in English, throughout the US and Europe.

  In addition to teaching, research, and writing, I have directed over a dozen foreign study programs in France and India and organized numerous international colloquia.  I served as the editor of Cahiers du dix-septième for almost a decade and am the past president of the North American Society of Seventeenth-Century French Literature, and The Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies (SE-17). As President of these professional organizations I organized their annual international conferences. I was appointed to the editorial board of PMLA, and am currently on the boards of Women in French and Eighteenth-Century Studies.