Shiflett Defends Dissertation
Congratulations to Stephanie Shiflett! Stephanie successfully defended her dissertation on November 18 and will graduate with a Doctor of Philosophy in French Language & Literature in January 2020.
Stephanie worked with Prof. Irit Kleiman on her dissertation, as well as Tom Conley of Harvard. Her dissertation is titled Confessional Fragments: Religious Belief Expressed Through Body Parts in Sixteenth-Century French Literature.
From Stephanie’s abstract:
How does the body manifest religious belief? What happens when that belief shatters? These questions were critical in sixteenth-century France when religious conflict rattled many individuals’ faith. A startling—and related—motif in the literature of the period features one part of the body overwhelming the world. These texts, this dissertation argues, manifest religious belief through this motif. Through a method of close textual and visual analysis, this study argues that in an era when openly stating one’s personal religious beliefs could have fatal consequences, the digestive tract, heart, and other parts of the body sometimes took on the work of expressing religious belief.