Adjunct Professor

Bernadette Fort, Professor of French and Adjunct Professor of Art History, is Agrégée  de l'Université (German) and holds a Doctorat in French Literature from the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. Her research and teaching interests  include literature and visual arts in the eighteenth century, French art criticism, the cultural history of the Ancien Régime  and the Revolution, Enlightenment print culture, and gender issues in literature and art.
Books and edited volumes. Le Langage de l'ambiguité dans l'oeuvre de Crébillon fils (Klincksieck, 1978); Fictions of the French Revolution (co-author and ed., NU Press 1991); The Mémoires secrets and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France (co-author and co-ed with J. Popkin, Voltaire Foundation, 1998); Les Salons des Mémoires secrets (Ensb-a, 1999); a critical, annotated  edition (36-page introduction)  of Crébillon's Lettres de la Duchesse de*** au Duc*** (Classiques Garnier, 2002); The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (co-author and co-ed. with A. Rosenthal, Princeton U. P., 2001); and an English translation of Hélène Cixous’ La Ville parjure (Routledge, 2003).
Her recent essays have focused on issues of gender in eightenth-century culture, art, and art criticism: “Framing the Wife: J.B Greuze’s Sexual Contract” (Tübingen, 2003); “Peinture et féminité chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau”  (Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 2004); “Indicting the Woman Artist:A.D. Therbusch, Diderot, and Le Libertin” (Lumen, 2004). Three more essays on Greuze and gender are in press, including one on “The Greuze Girl” in a volume of essays on French Genre Painting forthcoming from the National Gallery of Art in 2006.  Another essay is forthcoming on the reception of women painters at the Royal Academy’s Salon of 1787.  Continuing Fort’s work on the Mémoires secrets is “L'Écriture politique dans les Salons des Mémoires secrets,” in a volume co-ed. byH.J. Lüsebrink and J. Popkin (SVEC 2004).
Lectures.  Among her recent lectures are plenary addresses at the Midwest Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2001) and the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-century Studies (2002).  She has lectured in London (Institut français de Londres),  France (Cerisy, the Camargo Foundation), Germany (Landau and  Bamberg), Italy (University of Palermo), Canada (Canadian Center for German and European Studies, Montréal), and in the USA: Dartmouth College, UCLA, USC, the Univ. of Missouri at Columbia. She has participated on panels at the CAA and the MLA and regularly delivers papers at the national and regional meetings of ASECS.
Service to the Profession. Fort was editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal Eighteenth-Century Studies (1998-2004) and is presently Second Vice-President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has organized  numerous conferences and seminars on eighteenth-century art, literature, and culture. At Northwestern she led the Northwestern Eighteenth-Century Seminar for ten years. She currently serves on the Northwestern University Press Board.
Honors. Fort was the recipient of the ASECS Clifford Prize in 1990. Her book on Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (co-ed. with A. Rosenthal) received a New York Book Show Award in 2002 and the prize of the Historians of British Art of the College Art Association  for best multi-authored volume on British visual art from any period. The 4 volumes of Claude Crébillon’s Œuvres complètes (gen. ed. J. Sgard) to which Fort contributed her edition of Lettres de la Duchesse received the Montesquieu Prize in 2002. Fort has been the recipient of awards from the French government  (Chevalier dans l'ordre des palmes académiques), the National Endowment  for the Humanities, the Camargo Foundation (twice), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century  Studies,  the Lilly Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Lurcy Educational Trust, and Northwestern University (a President’s fellowship and several grants from the Office of Research). She also received two Distinguished Teaching Awards from Northwestern University.

b-fort@northwestern.edu