Romance Languages Professor Garners Prizes for Two Books
January 13, 2004
Professor of Romance languages Joan DeJean’s latest books have earned her accolades from two different learned societies.
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Her recently published The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France received the Modern Language Association of America’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Literary Studies. The book is an exploration of the interactions between literature that was considered obscene in 17th-century France and the society that deemed it to be so. This prize, which is awarded each year for an outstanding book in its field, was presented at the association’s annual convention last month.
In addition, the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women has just named Professor DeJean to receive its award for the best translation/teaching edition published in 2002. She receives this award for Against Marriage: The Correspondence of the Grande Mademoiselle, DeJean’s translation of the letters of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier. The duchesse was a first cousin of Louis XIV and the richest woman in 17th-century France. Her letters, including four previously unpublished, condemn the prevailing system of marriage in which women were traded by their families for money, social advantage, or military alliance.
Professor DeJean is the Trustee Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages. Her areas of research include 17th- and 18th-century French literature, the history of women's writing in France, the history of sexuality, the development of the novel, and the cultural history of late 17th- and early 18th-century France. She is the author of five other books, including Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle, which was a finalist for the prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association in 1998.