Janet Beizer

(On Leave Spring 2024)
Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (French)
C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France

Academic Degrees: B.A. in French, summa cum laude, Cornell University; M.A., M.Phil., Ph. D. in French with Secondary Field in Comparative Literature, Yale University.

Non-Degree Studies: École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and Université de Grenoble.

Janet Beizer is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France. Before coming to Harvard, she taught in the French Department at the University of Virginia; she has been a visiting professor at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Her research interests include 19th-21st century French literature and culture, with a specialization in the nineteenth-century novel and short story; food studies and philosophies of eating; narrative theory; postcard history; the culture of hysteria; psychoanalysis and literature, medicine and literature; travel writing; women's biographies and autobiographies. Among Professor Beizer's publications are the following books: Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women's Biographies (Cornell University Press, 2009), for which she was awarded a Cabot Fellowship; Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteris in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell University Press, 1994), which received the 1995 MLA Scaglione Prize for best book in French and Francophone Studies; Family Plots: Balzac's Narrative Generations (Yale University Press, 1986). She is currently finishing an interdisciplinary book manuscript that spins together threads of the visual arts, alimentary history, and literary criticism, "The Harlequin Eaters: Leftovers and the Patchwork Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Paris." Her current research and writing focus on intersections of the literary, the visual, and the culinary; she is completing an article on Holocaust recipe recitations and cookbooks and their representations in twenty-first century film and fiction. She sits on the board of various international journals of French literary and cultural studies, including Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Dix-Neuf, and Contemporary French Civilization.

Recent Articles (Select List)

“The House of Harlequins: Eugène Sue's Mystères de Paris.” Romanic Review, vol. 112, no. 3, 2021, pp. 281–304.
“Shooting them Softly: Photographing Lower-Class Eaters in Belle Époque Paris.” Food and Power: Proceedings of The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2019, edited by Mark McWilliams, Prospect Books, 2020, pp. 57–66.
“Why the French Hate Doggie Bags.” Beyond Gastronomy, special issue of Contemporary French Civilization vol. 42, no. 3–4, 2017, pp. 373–89.
“Translating the Self: Colette and the ‘Fatally Autobiographical’ Text.” Translation and the Arts, edited by Sonya Stephens, Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 189–208.
“Colette’s Côtelettes, or the Word Made Flesh.” Being Contemporary, Festschrift for S. R. Suleiman, edited by Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur, Liverpool University Press, 2016, pp. 305–18.