Rachel Mesch to Join BU Romance Studies
Dr. Rachel Mesch will join us in September as Professor of French. With a BA from Yale, an MA from Columbia, and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Mesch is the author of three highly-praised books dealing with the French literature of the long 19th-century, with a particular emphasis on “gender, women writers, feminist history, trans identities,” and the representation of women’s lives in literature, in popular culture, and in medical and scientific discourse.
Mesch’s most recent book, Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2020), was shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Annual Book Prize and awarded a silver medal in the Independent Publisher Awards LGBTQ+Nonfiction Category. Before Trans vindicates story-telling and biography as modes of literary criticism, presenting “linked biographies of three writers—Jane Dieulafoy, Rachilde and Marc de Montifaud—who pushed the boundaries of gender identity. Their intricate, personal stories provide vital historical context for our own efforts to understand the nature of gender identity and the ways in which it might be expressed.”
Beside her three books, Mesch is the co-editor of a special issue (on marriage in 19th-century France) in Dix-Neuf and the author of 18 scholarly articles, 23 invited lectures, and a number of pieces of what she calls “popular writing,” in which she reaches beyond the immediate academic community to a more general public in such publications as the LA Review of Books, Slate, the Stanford University Press Blog, Tablet, and other venues, including her own blogging on French culture and women’s issues.