Stephen Shapiro
Stephen Shapiro’s research on early-modern French literature and culture focuses on aristocratic memoirs, the history of sexuality, culinary culture, and the history of the city of Paris. He is currently looking at the development of a modern gay culture in 18th-century Paris.
Biography
Shapiro, a scholar of seventeenth-century French literature and culture, has taught at New York University (New York and Paris), Université de Paris V, and the College of the Holy Cross. He has published on the interplay of fiction and historiography in early-modern aristocratic memoirs in Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Romance Studies, and Studies in Early Modern France. Current research projects focus on the use of the footnote as a strategy of dissident political commentary, Racine’s play Esther and early modern carnival culture, and the culinary memoir. Shapiro’s other interests include the history of American Francophobia and Francophilia, French culinary culture, and the grand siècle as cultural myth. He is currently the editor of French 17: An Annual Descriptive Bibliography of Seventeenth-Century French Studies. BA (classics, Latin), Yale; MA, PhD (French), New York University. Shapiro joined the Bennington faculty of the Isabelle Kaplan Center for Languages and Culture in Fall 2010.