Joan E. DeJean papers (MS.2024.001)

Biographical / Historical

Joan DeJean was a pioneer in the feminist literary critical movement, especially as it relates to the reading of French texts. DeJean was Trustee Professor Emerita of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. She was born on October 4, 1948, in southwest Louisiana and grew up in a French-speaking family. She received her BA in 1969 from Tulane University's Newcomb College and her PhD from Yale University in 1974, where she studied with Sterling Professor of French, and later Yale Provost, Georges May. DeJean was recognized with numerous honors and awards for her work on women's writing, the history of sexuality, the development of the novel, and material culture in 17th- and 18th-century France. As both an author and an editor, she campaigned for better recognition of female French novelists. DeJean was awarded the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching from the University of Pennsylvania, the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, the Morse fellowship at Yale University, a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 2003 she won the Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for her book The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France. In 2020, DeJean was elected a fellow of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social sciences. She was also an aficionado of opera and a devoted supporter of the arts. She died on December 2, 2023, following a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.