Scholarship and Biography
Catherine J. Lewis Theobald, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and the Chair of the Department of Romance Studies. Her research has two main foci: early modern French literature and word-image studies (particularly portraiture and illustrated books). Many of her publications focus on visual imagery in a wide variety of seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts (novels, plays, broadsheets, caricatures) and in print culture. In journals such as French Forum, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, and Women in French Studies, she explores the idea that the literary portrait, despite its reputation as a mere salon game, has an evolving presence in a large body of early modern writing. Several of her publications address questions of gender, identity, viewing, and pleasure in early French and English illustrated novels. Several publications examine visual and verbal media surrounding eighteenth-century marvels like the Montgolfier balloons and canal technology, and her most recent publication (in RRR 2026) is a collaboration with Brandeis alum Alyssa Knudsen, a former student, on the notion of play and play spaces in the lithographs of Honoré Daumier. She is currently preparing two articles: one on competing notions of "flesh" in early depictions of indigenous Americans and a second one on references to giants and to Gulliver's Travels in the Daumier lithographs. Dr Theobald strives to enrich her teaching by bringing her research into the classroom at all levels, and she has received several grants to create courses on francophone North America at Brandeis. She has developed upper-level classes in French entitled "Picturing Versailles: Portrait, Space, and Spectacle under the Sun King," "La Révolution tranquille?: Québec’s Culture Wars on Stage and Screen," "Wordplay: Humor in Francophone Texts," "Myth and Migration in Francophone North America," "French Revolutions and Rebels," and "Le Livre illustré," which explores illustrated texts from illuminated manuscripts to contemporary comics. She is thrilled to be a part of the Brandeis community.