Lorraine Piroux

Lorraine Piroux serves as Associate Professor of French and Chair of the Department of French at Rutgers University's School of Arts and Sciences. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses including Belonging in Francophone Literature and Film, Understanding the French Enlightenment, and specialized seminars on Diderot, print culture, and 18th-century aesthetics.

Her educational background includes:

• Maîtrise and DEA from Université Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle
• M.A. from University of Illinois at Chicago
• Ph.D. from Northwestern University

Professor Piroux's research centers on Enlightenment-era material textuality, examining how 18th-century authors contested legibility norms through torn books, desecrated pages, and reinvented book forms. Her work bridges literary analysis with philosophical inquiries into writing's relationship with physical media, emphasizing the 'irreducible materiality of the written sign' as a challenge to Western book ideals. She investigates authorship crises through figures like Diderot and Rousseau while exploring aesthetics of illegibility across genres.

Her publication trajectory reveals deepening engagement with textual materiality—from early studies on dedicatory play (1998) to illegibility in Enlightenment book culture (2006) and contemporary manifestations like Cornell's art boxes (2010). Recent work expands into authorlessness in theater (2011) and historical realism (2012), consistently framing print culture as a site of epistemological contestation where physical book properties challenge abstract philosophical systems.

Key recognitions include:

• William Riley Parker prize for her PMLA essay (2006)
• Stanford Humanities Center fellowship (2000-01)

She actively mentors through graduate seminars on 'Figures of the Literary in Eighteenth-Century Book Culture' and 'Print Culture of the Ancien Régime,' while co-organizing the Rutgers Seminar on the History of the Book since 2007. Current research extends her investigation into impersonal authorship within 18th-century dramatic fiction, examining how theatrical anonymity reshapes Enlightenment knowledge production.

Professor Piroux maintains leadership through departmental chairmanship and contributes to institutional intellectual life via the History of the Book seminar, which fosters interdisciplinary dialogue on textual materiality across historical periods.