Kathrina LaPorta is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of French Literature, Thought & Culture. Kathrina completed a B.A. in French and Political Science at Bucknell University and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in French Literature from New York University.
Kathrina has taught courses in the language program and in the undergraduate program at NYU. In all of her courses, Kathrina encourages students to appreciate the connections and divergences between the French language today and the ways French has been spoken, written, circulated, and disseminated in the past.
A literary historian by training, Kathrina's research interests reside primarily in the intersection of politics and literature in early modern France, and in the intersections between the early modern period and contemporary critical theory.
Her book Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2021. The book employs performativity as a conceptual framework to propose a literary history of the French-language pamphlets that assail absolutism during Louis XIV's personal reign. Her work has also appeared in publications such as Early Modern French Studies, French Studies Bulletin, and the Cahiers du dix-septième siècle: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Before returning to NYU as a Clinical Assistant Professor, Kathrina was Visiting Lecturer in French at Dartmouth College and a Visiting Assistant Professor of French at NYU. At Dartmouth, she received funding from the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the Neukom Institute for Computational Science to create a digital critical edition.
Between 2017 and 2021, Kathrina served as co-editor for 17th-century French Literature (Prose) for The Literary Encyclopedia.