Allison Stedman

Related People
Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau
Ann Gonzalez
Sandra Watts

EducationStedman, Allison

  • Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2002 (French Literature)
  • M.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1999 (French Literature)
  • A.M., Dartmouth College, 1997 (Comparative Literature; French, Italian, Spanish)
  • A.B., magna cum laude, Dartmouth College, 1996 (Comparative Literature; French, Italian)

Profile

As a literary historian specializing in French cultural history, my goal is to help students learn to read texts on multiple levels, analyzing not only their content, but also their form and style. My classes are designed to encourage students to look beyond what a text communicates overtly in the plot, focusing instead on how ideas are embedded and repeated as narrative patterns that are generally unconsciously produced by the author. Unearthing an author’s implicit cultural biases enables us to learn more about the ways in which people related to the world around them during the time period in which the text was created.

Before arriving at UNC-Charlotte, I taught at Bucknell University from 2002-2007.

Links


Research and Teaching Interests

  • Early Modern / early Enlightenment French literature
  • Literature’s role in creating Enlightenment Culture
  • Experimental literature, particularly generic hybrids
  • Intersections between literature, music and the fine arts in France and Italy
  • Relationships between mental processes and physical symptoms during the early modern period
  • Early Modern French Pilgrimage Practices


Books

In Progress

Imagining and Forgetting: The Mind-Body Connection in Early Modern France (1580-1715)   Project funded by an NEH faculty fellowship (spring-fall 2017) and by a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society (summer 2013).

Forthcoming 

Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Countess de Murat, The Sprites of Kernosy Castle. Edited and Translated with Perry Gethner. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series. New York: Iter Press, 2023.


In Print
Books in Print

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Secret History in Pre-Revolutionary France.” In Secret History in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Rachel Carnell and Rebecca Bullard (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2017) 205-15.
  • “Lafayette Rewrites History, Murat Rewrites Lafayette: the Novel and the Transfiguration of the Social Sphere in Old-Regime France.” Cahiers du dix-septième: An Interdisciplinary Journal XIV (2012) 1-21.
  • “ ‘The Savage’ by Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat,” trans. Allison Stedman, in Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Tales and New Critical Perspectives, Ed. Christine Jones and Jennifer Shacker (Ontario: Broadview, 2012) 201-218.
  • “Jean Racine, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier de Villandon, and Charles Perrault: A Revised Triumvirate,” in Options for Teaching 17th and 18th-Century French Women Writers. (New York: Modern Languages Association of America, 2011) 101-108.
  • “Prolepic Subversion: Longing for the Middle Ages in the Fin-de-siècle French Fairy Tale.” The Romanic Review 99:2 (2008) 369-386.
  • “Teaching the Interdisciplinary Seventeenth-Century to Undergraduates: A Literary Historian’s Perspective,” Cahiers du dix-septième: An Interdisciplinary Journal XI: 1 (2006) 103-122.
  • “D’Aulnoy’s Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas (1690): a Fairy-Tale Manifesto,” Marvels & Tales:  Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 19:1 (2005) 32-53.