Katherine Kong, an assistant professor of French in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, and affiliated with the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, recently published her first book, Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France. Kong also has an article forthcoming in Romance Quarterly, “Writing Love in the Thirteenth Nouvelle: Marguerite de Navarre’s Epistolary Fictions.”
In the Age of Gates, letter writing has degenerated into emails and the 140 characters circumscribing tweets. There was a time, however, when letter writing was not only an art form, it was a window into the writer’s soul. In an earlier era, letters helped shape the relationships between friends and lovers, teachers and students, allies and adversaries, superiors and subordinates. Through the letters exchanged between Heloise and Abelard, Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie, and others, Kong examines the evolution of the pre-modern self.
A specialist in medieval and early modern French literature and culture, Kong earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2004. She is currently working on her second book, about translation in medieval and early modern France. Her other research interests include Latin literature, language, and culture; gender and women’s studies; literary theory; medieval manuscript culture; translation studies; and law and literature.
Selected Publications
“Writing Love in the Thirteenth Nouvelle: Marguerite de Navarre’s Epistolary Fictions,” forthcoming in Romance Quarterly.
Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France, D.S. Brewer: Cambridge, UK (2010).
“The Ethics of Secrecy in La Chastelaine de Vergi,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 61.2, Summer (2007): 137-156.
“Rhetorical Teaching in the Epistre au Dieu d’Amours,” Dalhousie French Studies 78, Spring (2007): 3-15.
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