Giulia Pacini

Giulia Pacini is Professor of French & Francophone Studies at William & Mary. She is a specialist in French eighteenth-century literary and cultural history, and holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her research focuses on the history of deforestation and attendant discourses of climate instability in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More generally she is interested in human-arboreal relations and arboreal representations of the French body politic in late ancien régime and revolutionary France. This work finds its place within the emerging field of literary and cultural plant studies while also intersecting with more traditional French political and environmental histories. Questions of particular interest include: How were trees apprehended and valued in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Why did they serve as such powerful metaphors in eighteenth-century French discourse? What kinds of material, symbolic, and ideological work did trees and tree metaphors do? Within this context, Pacini's research has often focused on the political philosophies that transpire from eighteenth-century discourses and practices of pruning, grafting, felling, planting, and transplanting.

Secondary research interests include early modern women's writing and discourses of women's rights. For a list of relevant publications see here.

Giulia Pacini also enjoys teaching interdisciplinary seminars in French & Francophone cultural studies, as well as language classes at all levels of the curriculum. In 2024 she received an Arts & Sciences Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. Some of her favorite courses include:

FREN 100: "Fictions of Nature" (in English)

FREN 150: "Slow Living, ou l'art de végéter" (in French)

FREN 314: "Introduction to French Cultural Studies" (in French)

FREN 315: "Provocative Texts: French Literature in its Cultural Contexts" (in French)

FREN 316: "The French Revolution" (in French)

FREN 316/ 321: "The Spectacular Culture of Early Modern France" (in French)

FREN 316/ 321: "Versailles" (in French)

FREN 316/ 390: "Politics of Nature" (in French)

FREN 332: “Scandalous Women” (in French)

FREN 332: "The Tribunal of Public Opinion" (in French)

FREN 450: "Liberté et Libertins" (in French)