Position Title
Professor, Department of French & Italian, Director of the Humanities Program
Claire Goldstein studies early modern French-language literature and culture, with publications including In the Sun King’s Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (2025) and Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures and Accidents that Made Modern France (2008). Her scholarship is motivated by her abiding interests in visual and material culture her curiosity about how the things people see, and the objects and material practices that they engage with, create cultural meanings. Professor Goldstein’s current research seeks to understand how the circulation and recycling of fashion accessories in 17th century France traces connections between continents and classes and engages multifarious discourses about what it means to be human.