Director of the French and Italian Program
Associate Professor, French/Comparative Literature at UCR
 

Theda Shapiro teaches French literature and culture from the origins of France up to the present day, and Italian literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. She especially enjoys teaching a course on the history, mythology, and literature of Paris, and she has recently taught an introduction to world literature (16th thru 18th centuries), courses on French literature and life in the middle ages and the twentieth century, on 20th century French theater, Italian literature and culture in medieval and modern times, and European women writers. Her research interests focus on the culture of the city, on artists and society, and on recent literature and film by descendants of immigrants from francophone countries in France.
 

Professor Shapiro is the author of Painters and Politics: the European Avant-Garde and Society, 1900-1925 (Elsevier, 1974), and of articles and papers on artists in the metropolis, Paris architecture and urban planning, the pedagogy of French civilization, and issues in international education. Her current research projects include a study of 18th century artists in Paris, with particular focus on the landscape painter Joseph Vernet; a study of recent novels and films by first and second generation North African immigrants that deal with life in the Paris suburbs; and an interpretive essay on the future of historical archives in the age of the digital.