Kathryn Grossman

Kathryn Grossman

Professor of French
Kathryn Grossman

Fields

Nineteenth-century French novel; Victor Hugo studies; utopian studies; popularized versions of literary classics

Education

AB Bryn Mawr College
MPhil & PhD Yale University

Professional Bio

Kathryn Grossman combines her specialization in Victor Hugo’s fiction with interests in utopian/ visionary/ poetic narratives; theory of metaphor and representations of the sublime; the pedagogy of literature; and the recycling of literary classics in other media. Besides her work on Hugo’s novels (Droz 1986; SIUP 1994; Twayne-Macmillan 1996; OUP 2012), she has written on politics and poetics in such post-Revolutionary writers as Claire de Duras, George Sand, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, and Yevgeny Zamiatin. Her most recent book, Les Misérables and Its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage, and Screen, a co-edited volume with Dr. Bradley Stephens at the University of Bristol, was published by Routledge in 2015, and she is currently working on a book-length study of the reception of Les Misérables in the U.S. from publication in 1862 to the late-twentieth century, using digital archival resources. She served as head of the Department of French and Francophone Studies from 2015 to 2018.