Christine Clark-Evans

- Associate Professor of French, Women's Studies, and African and African American Studies

At Barnard College, Columbia University, I received the A. B. in French (1970) and minored in Italian. The birth of our daughters and the personal investment of time in both my family and my community prepared me to return to academia motivated and focused. During my advanced studies, I worked in pre- and post-production on scholarly journals in history and mathematics. At Bryn Mawr (Pennsylvania) I received the M.A. (1981), presenting a Master's Thesis on Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, and the Ph.D. (1987) in French, defending my dissertation on Diderot.

Presently an Associate Professor of French literature and specialist in literature, sixteenth and eighteenth-century, I came to Penn State in 1988, after completing a Folger Institute for Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Studies Postdoctoral Seminar on Extemporaneity in the Renaissance Text. I had previously been awarded a Newberry Library Short Term Resident Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Travel to Collections Grant for research concerning "Diderot's Psycho-physiology of Speech." I have given papers and invited lectures at international and national conferences and have also been awarded grants for research by the American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies and the Offices and the Offices of Research nd Graduate Studies and Minority Faculty Development. As Penn State's first recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for Minorities I was able to do research at the Centre d'Etude du Xville Siècle, Universitè de Montpellier, France, on Diderot and language. Diderot's 'La Religieuse.' A Philosophical Novel, is the book I wrote on my return. My interest in sixteenth-century French literature is mostly in poetics and rhetoric, and in the Eighteenth-century my focus is on Diderot Studies and the Novel. I have also taught a course Race and Gender Issues in French Literature in Translation, which is offered jointy by the French, the African-African American Studies, and the Women's Studies Departments and a course Love and Death in the Renaissance crosslisted in the French, Italian, and Comparative Literature Departments. Most recently I have taught a course 'Age of Rabelais' whose main object was "Gargangua and the Literatry Origins of Science-Fiction Cinema." It was a comparative and historical view of Rabelais's texts and science-fiction films for their shared modes of expression (metaphorses, narration, etc.) and their shared values (Gigantism, the Renaissance Man, the Problematic Status of Women, Pow

To balance my professional and personal life, I maintain an avid interest in film, dance, and the history of art.

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