Faculty Profiles

Ann T. Delehanty joined the Reed faculty in 2000 after completing a PhD in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in philosophy at Carleton College. She is a professor of French and Humanities. She teaches Humanities 110, French language, French literature from the medieval and early modern periods, and comparative literature. She teaches courses that cover all literary genres. She has a particular interest in how literature serves a vital social role not only by representing social relationships but also by critiquing the (sometimes) harmful presumptions that lie behind those relationships. Delehanty's research is focused on the literature and philosophy of early modern Europe, particularly France, Spain, and England. Her first book, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France: From Poetics to Aesthetics, came out from Bucknell UP in 2013. That book traces the shift away from rule-based poetics in the late seventeenth century and towards experience- and sentiment-based aesthetics in the early eighteenth century. Her second book, entitled Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France (Routledge, 2022), argues that the experimental form of several early modern novels served to allow their authors to "disillusion" (desengañar) their readers and to make a veiled skeptical critique.