
On Leave
Profile
Katie Chenoweth joined the department as Assistant Professor of French in 2013. She received her PhD in French Studies from Brown University in 2010. Before coming to Princeton she taught at Washington and Lee University and was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.
Research
Her research is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, media studies, and the history of the book. Her primary areas of specialization are the Renaissance (sixteenth century) and contemporary French thought, with a focus on deconstruction and the work of Jacques Derrida. She has published articles on Montaigne, Derrida, media history, and other topics in venues such as Discourse, Montaigne Studies, symploke, and The Comparatist.
Her first book, The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2019), charts the technological reinvention of the French “mother tongue” that begins in printers’ workshop during the first half of the sixteenth century. Her current book project, Strange Flowers: Radical Quotation from Montaigne to Derrida (under contract with Northwestern University Press), reassesses the importance of both citationality and Montaigne’s Essays for modern thought.
Katie Chenoweth is the director of the Bibliothèque Derrida at Éditions du Seuil, a collection that includes Derrida’s unpublished seminars and other posthumous works. At Princeton, she is the director of Derrida’s Margins, an ongoing digital humanities project dedicated to Derrida’s personal library, housed in Princeton’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
Publications
Books and Edited Volumes
- The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming)
- Strange Flowers: Radical Quotation from Montaigne to Derrida (Northwestern Unversity Press, “Rethinking the Early Modern” series, under contract)
- Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III. Sexe, Race, Nation, Humanité, co-edited with Geoffrey Bennington and Rodrigo Therezo (Éditions du Seuil, 2018)
- Theory, Translation, Universality: Contemporary Debates, co-edited with Gavin Arnall (Fordham University Press, under contract).
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
- “Glossings: Reading Surface and Depth in the Essais,” in Visions of Space in Early Modern Europe, eds. Dorothea Heitsch and Jeremie Korta (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming).
- “The Corrector as Critic: Jacques Peletier du Mans,” in The Places of Early Modern Criticism, eds. Emma Gilby and Gavin Alexander (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- “Derrida at Montaigne: A Stay of Execution,” in Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida’s Seminars and the New Abolitionism, ed. Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Straub (Fordham University Press, 2018).
- “Rock, Paper, Scissors: On Media Revolution and the Death Penalty,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 39.1 (2017).
- “The Beast, the Sovereign, and the Letter: Vernacular Posthumanism,”symplokē 23: 1-2 (2015).
- “The Force of a Law: Derrida, Montaigne, and the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts (1539),” The Comparatist 36 (2012).
- “Montaigne’s Touch of French: From Langage to Langue,” Montaigne Studies 24 (2012).
Courses
- FRE 221: The Rise of France: French Literature, Culture, and Society
- FRE 224: Approaches to the Language of Literary Texts
- FRE 307: Advanced French Language and Style
- FRE 393: New Media, 1400-1900
- FRE 430: Derrida’s Library: Deconstruction and the Book
- FRE 514: Human, Animal, Machine
- FRE 513: The Matter of the Book: Montaigne’s Essays
Media/Miscellaneous
Derrida’s Library: Deconstruction and the Book