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 book illustration). Her work focuses on interactions between verbal and visual imagery in a wide variety of seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts and contexts, including novels, plays, broadsheets, and caricatures. In journals such as French Forum, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, and Women in French Studies, she has published papers exploring the idea that the literary portrait, despite its reputation as a mere salon game, had an evolving presence in a large body of early modern writing. Several of her publications address questions of gender, identity, viewing, epistolarity, and pleasure in early French and English illustrated novels such as Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. Two more recent articles in the journals Lumen and 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Period examine visual and verbal media surrounding early modern marvels like the Montgolfier balloons and cutting-edge canal technologies, 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, most of which engage with the Brandeis rare books collection. She is thrilled to be a part of the Brandeis community.