Author and scholar Joan DeJean, who "was recognized with numerous honors and awards for her work on women's writing, the history of sexuality, the development of the novel, and material culture," died December 2, the University of Pennsylvania's Almanac reported. She was 75. DeJean was Trustee Professor Emerita of Romance Languages in the School of Arts & Sciences at Penn, and a renowned scholar of 17th- and 18th-century French literature.
Her 12 books include The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual and the Modern Home Began, which was named one of 2009's top art and architecture books by the New York Times. She received the 2002 Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for her book The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France.
DeJean was awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies for her research. Her work on fashion and style in pre-Revolutionary France gained notice widely through interviews in venues such as NPR, the New York Times, and Rick Steves' Europe, the Almanac noted.
"Joan was a pioneer in the feminist readings of French texts, and in the feminist literary critical movement, a field that was neglected for many years," said Lance Donaldson-Evans, a former colleague in Penn's department of French and Francophone studies. "I know very few scholars who were as passionate about their scholarship as Joan."
Her other works include Scarron's Roman Comique (1977); Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (1991); Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 (1989); Literary Fortifications (1984); Libertine Strategies (1981); Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (1997); The Essence of Style (2005); and How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (2014).
In 2020, DeJean was elected a fellow of the British Academy for the humanities and social sciences. In 2021, the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF) published a volume of essays in her honor: How to Do Things with Style: Essays in Honor of Joan, edited by Amy S. Wyngaard and Roland Racevskis.
DeJean's book Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast (2022) led to the creation of an interactive digitized map that situates these women's biographies in New Orleans settlements.