Monica Michaud
Educational Background: B.A. in Philosophy from Boston University in 2000 (with a minor concentration in French); M.A. in French Cultural Studies from Columbia University in 2002; D.E.A. in French Literature from Université de Paris VII – Denis Diderot in 2003
Research Interests: 18th-century French literature, political philosophy, philosophy of language, travel narratives, Enlightenment anthropology, libertine materialism, critical theory. My dissertation, with the working title “Thinking Language Politically: Cultural Representation and Alterity in Eighteenth-century French literature”, explores the ways that culturally-constructed sign systems, or what I refer to as “cultural language”, shape relationships of power both within and among communities. The corpus currently includes works by Rousseau, l’Abbé Raynal, Bougainville, Diderot, Graffigny, and Sade.