Associate Professor
Penn State U, University Park
Biographical Sketch: Tracy Rutler is a scholar of early modern French and Francophone literature and philosophy, with a particular interest in the eighteenth century. Her research and teaching interests include queer studies, disability studies, psychoanalytic theory, political philosophy, and early materialist and vitalist theories. Her first book, Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Liverpool UP, 2021), demonstrates how the heteronormative bourgeois family’s rise to dominance in late-eighteenth-century France had long been contested within the fictional worlds of many French authors. She is currently working on a second book, tentatively called Careful Science: Reimagining Disability in the Early Modern Francophone World, which examines medical texts alongside fiction, diaries, and accounts of healing practices in many early French colonies to show how we might redefine the meaning of dis/ability.