Professor Emerita of French
Research and Teaching
Elizabeth Goldsmith’s research focuses on French literature and culture of the early modern period. Her books include Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (1988), Publishing Women’s Life Stories, 1647-1720 (2001), and Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (1989). She co-edited a collection of essays with Dena Goodman, Going Public: Women and Publishing in the Ancien Régime (1995), with Colette Winn Lettres de femmes (2004), and with Patricia Cholakian La Vérité dans son jour (1998), the memoirs of Marie Mancini. Her book The Kings’ Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin was published in 2012.
Professor Goldsmith’s teaching focused on the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially theatre, letters, the novel, travel writing, and memoirs. She was awarded a long-term senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as short-term awards from the American Philosophical Society, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, and the NEH. She has been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome and has taught at Harvard University, the Dartmouth French Cultural Studies Institute, and in the NEH summer seminar program.