Laurence S Mall

Laurence S Mall is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Illinois. She holds a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania (1990) and has been affiliated with the University of Illinois since 1994. Her research focuses on Eighteenth-century French literature and philosophy, particularly the works of the philosophes and the novel. She explores themes such as theories of everyday life, ethics in literature, historical memory, urban writing, and gender studies.

Her major works include Origines et retraites dans La Nouvelle Héloïse (1997) and Emile ou les figures de la fiction (2002), which analyze Rousseau's texts. She co-edited a special issue of L'Esprit Créateur (2012) on Rousseau and emotions. Current research examines Louis Sébastien Mercier’s urban texts and writers around the French Revolution.

Teaching interests span grammar, poetry, autobiography, contemporary France, and eighteenth-century studies including the novel, fiction-philosophy intersections, and intellectual history. She has published over fifty scholarly articles in French in journals like CLIO, Dix-huitième siècle, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.