Michèle Longino received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1984 and taught at Rice University before coming to Duke in 1989. Her interests in the epistolary genre and in women’s writing led to the publication of "Performing Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence" (1991). She has published articles on the writings of other seventeenth-century authors, including Mme d'Aulnoy, Marie de Gournay, Poullain de la Barre, Mme de Lafayette, Corneille, Boileau, Molière, and Racine. She has also published a book on the staging of exoticism in seventeenth-century France: "Orientalism and French Classical Drama" (2002). Her current research interests include travel accounts, questions of genre, feminist theory, and seventeenth-century French literature in a cultural studies context. In the context of her research on travel, she has published articles on Chardin, Galland, and Thévenot. Her current book project focuses on the theory and practice of travel writing, and is provisionally titled "Travel, or the Benefits of Discontent: Marseilles to Constantinople (1650-1700)."
| Office Location: | 205 Languages Building |
| Office Phone: | 919-660-3100 |
| Email Address: | |
| Web Page: | http://www.duke.edu/~michelel/projects/visions/ |
Teaching (Fall 2012):
| PhD in French Literature | University of Michigan | 1984 |
| M.A. | Claremont Graduate School | 1972 |
| BA | Rosary College | 1968 |
Current projects: Book Project: "Travel, or the Benefits of Discontent: Marseilles to Constantinople (1650-1700)"
Professor Longino's current book project examines the activity of travel and studies the genre of travel writing. It features travel journals, all penned between 1650 and 1700, by six French voyagers who followed roughly the same itinerary from Marseilles to Constantinople, and is finally relevant to the question of France's attitudinal resistance today to Turkey's inclusion in the European Union. She is organizing her new book around the travel journals of Guillaume-Joseph Grelot, the artist; Jean Chardin, the Protestant jewel merchant; Antoine Galland, the antiquarian; Laurent D'Arvieux, the linguist and diplomat; Jean Thévenot, the orientalist; and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the French king's diamond merchant. Each of these travelers treats the same basic trajectory--the sea voyage between Marseilles, then as now France's "Gateway to the Orient," and the port of destination, Constantinople, also then as now, a symbolic center of Levantine power, and the major hub of East-West contact. Together, these writings enable us to appreciate the diverse shapes that travel narrative can take at a single historical juncture and have much to teach us about the nature of travel writing.
Areas of Interest: 17th Century French Literature; Travel Writing; Early Modern Mediterranean Studies; History of Theater; The Epistolary Genre; Feminist Criticism; Theories of Genre