Rachel Mesch

Rachel Mesch is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University. She is the author of three interdisciplinary works on gender in nineteenth-century France, The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (2006); Having it All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman (2013); and Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (2020), which was a finalist for the American Library in Paris Annual book prize. Her new project asks what a trans studies approach can teach us about the relationship between gender, empire, and mass culture in nineteenth-century France. She has been co-hosting the “NCFS Unbound” book series since 2020, featuring conversations around new books in Nineteenth-Century French Studies.