Allison Stedman
French Literary Historian, Author, Editor and Translator
Allison Stedman is Professor of French at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, where she specializes in seventeenth-century French literary and cultural history. She is the author of Rococo Fiction in France, 1600–1715: Seditious Frivolity (Bucknell University Press, 2012), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. She is the co-editor and translator of two experimental novels by the Countess de Murat, A Trip to the Country, 1699 (Wayne State University Press, 2011) and The Sprites of Kernosy Castle (Iter/University of Chicago Press, 2024). She is the editor of a modern French edition of Murat’s Voyage de campagne (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014) and the co-editor of Murat’s Les Lutins du château de Kernosy (Classisques Garnier, 2024).
She has published widely on 17th-century hybrid literature, salon literature, fairy tales, women writers, literature and medicine, literature and philosophy, and on beliefs about the imagination’s ability to alter the material conditions of the body during the early modern period. Her current book project, Imagining and Forgetting: The Mind-Body Connection in Early Modern France (1550–1750), tentatively scheduled for release in 2026, has been supported by a 2013 grant from the American Philosophical Society and a 2017-18 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The book investigates how beliefs about the power of the imagination evolved over the course of the seventeenth century and influenced the ways in which the early modern French conceptualized the relationship between mental and physical states of being, and the role of individual agency in mind-body relations.
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