French government honors Huet

Princeton Professor Marie-Hélène Huet has been awarded the title of Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Officer in the Order of Academic Palms) by the French government for her contributions to culture and the arts.

In recognition of Huet's academic achievements, the cultural counselor of the French Embassy presented the title to Huet in a ceremony on May 10 at the French Embassy in New York City. The Order of Academic Palms was created by emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808; it is given twice a year to scholars and artists who have distinguished themselves in culture and the arts, and who have helped cultivate and develop these fields in France and abroad.

Huet, who is the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French and Italian, joined the Princeton faculty in 1999. She has written extensively on cultural history, historiography, 18th- and 19th-century literature, and the French Enlightenment.

Huet is the author of several books, among them "Monstrous Imagination," which was awarded the Harry Levin Prize in Comparative Literature, and "Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution." She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Bellagio Residential Fellowship.