Catherine Witt
Professor of French
French Department
Division of Literature and Languages
Catherine Witt specializes in modern French literature and film studies. She offers courses on poetry and poetics as well as French and Francophone literature, theatre, and critical theory and regularly contributes to the Film and Media Studies program. Her research centers on nineteenth-century poetry, philological imagination, and the work of poet-translators (Nerval, Desbordes-Valmore, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Judith Gautier, et al.). She has co-edited three books: Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France (University of London, imlr books, 2015), a collection of essays edited with Joseph Acquisto and Adrianna Paliyenko; Ententes – à partir d’Hélène Cixous (Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2019), edited with Stéphanie Boulard, on Cixous’s collaborations with contemporary artists and writers; and Redécouvrir Louisa Siefert: richesse d’une œuvre de femme à l’ère de la modernité (Honoré Champion, 2024), edited with Aimée Boutin and Adrianna Paliyenko, which constitutes the first comprehensive study of Siefert’s multifaceted literary production. In 2022 she and Grace An prepared a special issue of French Screen Studies on Ethics of Care in Documentary Film since 1968. Her articles have appeared in Œuvres et Critiques, Romanic Review, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Revue Verlaine, Parade Sauvage, Nottingham French Studies, among others. Catherine Witt holds a BA in Modern History and French from Oxford University (Merton College), a Masters in Modern European Literature from the University of Sussex, and a PhD from the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. She was also a student at École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and a visiting scholar at the Centre d’Études Poétiques (ENS–Lyon).