Deborah Steinberger

Biography

Deborah Steinberger, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature, joined the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures in 1994. Her areas of specialization include early modern French women writers and 17th and 18th-century French theater. She has published critical editions of works by Françoise Pascal (1632-c.1700), as well as articles in edited collections and encyclopedias about this dramatist, painter and poet. Her current research and writing focus on Le Mercure Galant, one of France's first newspapers. Her book, Women's Stories in Le Mercure Galant (1672-1710): Feminine Fictions in an Early French Periodical (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), examines the periodical's innovations, especially its cultivation of a female reading public and its navigation of the boundary between fact and fiction. She is a contributor to the international digital humanities project Le​s Nouvelles Nouvelles, an online edition of an early work by Donneau de Visé. Dr. Steinberger is an officer of the Society for Interdisciplinary French 17th-century Studies (SE17) and the recipient of a summe​r stipend grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2023) and a French in Higher Education grant from the French Government (2024).​ She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in French language, literature and culture. She also regularly offers for advanced undergraduates a French Theater Workshop, a course that culminates in a French-language stage production.
 

Degrees

• PhD, French Literature, New York University
• MA, Comparative Literature (French/Spanish), University of California at Berkeley
• BA, Comparative Literature (French/Spanish), Yale University