Joan DeJean has been Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988. She previously taught at Yale and at Princeton. She is the author of eleven books on French literature, history, and material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including most recently How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (2014); The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual–and the Modern Home Began (2009); The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (2005).
She lives in Philadelphia and, when in Paris, around the corner from the house where, in 1612, this story began.
Books in order of publication:
Libertine Strategies: Freedom And The Novel In Seventeenth Century France – 1981
Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade – 1984
Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 – 1989
Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France – 1993
Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle – 1997
The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France – 2002
The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (2005)
The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual–and the Modern Home Began (2009)
How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (2014)
The Queen’s Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis – 2018
Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast – 2022
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