Christiane Makward

Christiane (Perrin) Makward is Professor Emerita of French & Francophone Studies, and Women's Studies, living in Paris. She earned a BA from the Sorbonne (Paris IV), a Master's Degree from the University of Dakar, Senegal and a Doctorate of Literature on Poetic Structures in the New Novel from the Sorbonne (1974). She joined Penn State in 1977, after teaching in West Africa (Nigeria and Senegal), at the Univ. of Quebec-Rimouski and at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison. Her prime teaching responsibilities were contemporary French Literature and criticism, and Francophone Women Writers. Her prime research areas are French Feminist Theory and Women Writers in French. Her publications include about seventy articles in North American and European journals. She constructed the autobiography of Corinna Bille, a noted French Swiss fiction writer from about a thousand fragments: The True Tale of my Life was a best-seller in Francophone Switzerland in the summer of 1992. Her books also include a co-authored critical anthology of 8 plays in translation: Plays by French and Francophone Women. She is the principal author and general editor of a Literary Dictionary and Bibliographical Repertory of Women Writers in French (Paris: Khartala, 1996). She has also published an essay on Mayotte Capecia (1916-1952), a Martinican novelist (Karthala, 1999) and an anthology in translation of Corinna Bille’s short stories with Monika Giacoppe. She has also edited two volumes of plyas, by Corinna Bille and by Ina Césaire.