Christie McDonald

Literary and Cultural Critic and Theorist

Contact Information
Phone:(617) 496-2547
E-Mail: cmcdonal@fas.harvard.edu


Biographical Statement

McDonald is Smith Professor of French Language and Literature in the department of Romance languages and literatures at Harvard. Her research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and twentieth-century French literary and philosophical thought. She has also published in the areas of ethics, feminist theory, and the arts. Her publications include The Extravagant Shepherd: A Study of the Pastoral Vision in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1973; forthcoming reprint, 2007); The Dialogue of Writing (1985), Dispositions (1986), and The Proustian Fabric (1991). She is editor of The Ear of the Other (1988), co-editor of Transformations: The Languages of Culture and Personhood after Theory (1994), and editor of Images of Congo: Anne Eisner’s Art and Ethnology, 1946–58 (2005). Recently, she has written about the anxiety of change, failure, and the return of Enlightenment concerns within contemporary Europe and America, as well as the relationship of ethnology to art and literature. She is currently working on Rousseau and a project on French literature in a global context.