Faculty Profiles

Catherine Witt

Professor of French
French Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Catherine Witt is a scholar of French literature and film studies. She teaches a wide variety of courses on poetry and poetics, French and Francophone theatre, and critical theory, and regularly contributes courses on French, Francophone, and American cinemas to the Film and Media Studies program. Her research centers on nineteenth-century poetry, philological imagination, and the work of poet-translators from Gérard de Nerval to Anne-Marie Albiach. 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 oeuvre de femme à l’ère de la modernité (Honoré Champion, forthcoming March 2024), edited with Aimée Boutin and Adrianna Paliyenko, which constitutes the first comprehensive study of Siefert’s multifaceted literary production. Her articles have appeared in Œuvres et Critiques, Romanic Review, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Revue Verlaine, Parade Sauvage, Nottingham French Studies, among others. Recent scholarship includes a special issue of French Screen Studies, co-edited with Grace An, on Ethics of Care in Documentary Film since 1968. 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. In France, she was a student at École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and a visiting scholar (pensionnaire scientifique) at the Centre d’Études Poétiques (ENS–Lyon).

Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France
Ententes–à partir d’Hélène Cixous
Ethics of Care in Documentary Filmmaking since 1968


More faculty profiles