Catherine LeGouis

Professor of French

Specialization
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Russian literature

Catherine LeGouis, a comparatist by training, teaches French language, literature, and Nouvelle Vague film. She recently taught Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and is planning a seminar on Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu for the spring of 2008. She also teaches comparative courses on French and Russian literature, such as The Influence of Anxiety: Dostoevsky and France. She is a member of the European Studies Program.

Her research areas include nineteenth-century European literary history and comparative studies on French and Russian literature. LeGouis writes and speaks on Russian women who lived in France, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decadent movement in Europe, and ritual studies. She is the author of Positivism and Imagination (Bucknell University Press) and has edited, in collaboration with two colleagues from Smith College, Mon Histoire: Mémoires d'une femme de lettres russe à l'époque des Lumières (L'Harmattan, Paris), the autobiography of Princess Dashkova, a lady-in-waiting to Catherine the Great, one of the preeminent Russian intellectuals of the eighteenth century and a friend of Benjamin Franklin's.

LeGouis spends three to six months each year in Moscow, where she is working on a biography of Nina Petrovskaya, a Russian essayist and muse to major poets of the Russian Silver Age. She has received two IREX grants, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, for this project. Last year, she was the director of the joint Mount Holyoke-Colgate program in Russia, which took place in Vladimir, Russia's ancient capital, and in Moscow at RGGU, the Russian State Humanities University.