Professor Dominique Brancher will join the department in Fall 2023

We are truly thrilled to welcome Dominique Brancher to Yale. After three years as Visiting Professor, Dominique joins the French department permanently, starting next academic year. A specialist of the French Renaissance, with interests spanning the medieval period to the early seventeenth century (the Baroque), Dominique works at the intersection of several disciplines, among them history of the book, history of medicine, sexuality studies, animal and plant studies. Thus, she has considerably renewed her field. She counts as her many publications two ground-breaking books: Équivoques de la pudeur: Fabrique d’une passion à la Renaissance (Droz, 2015) and Quand l’esprit vient aux plantes (Droz, 2015). She is preparing an essay on Montaigne.

Dominique Brancher is the recipient of prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Prix de l’essai et de la critique littéraire (Geneva) for Équivoques de la pudeur.

She will be coming to us from the University of Basel (Switzerland) where she is Professor of French in the Faculty of Philosophy and History. She previously taught at the University of Bern, was visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, the Université de Genève, and the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne.  She holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (2002) and earned a thèse d’habilitation from the Université de Genève (2012).