Teaching

Like her scholarship, Matlock's courses explore the intersection of several disciplines and theoretical models. "Her courses are provocative in their ways of looking at French culture," says colleague Susan R. Suleiman, professor of Romance and comparative literatures.

Matlock says her work is motivated in part by experiences she had in Paris, while she was studying at the L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in the mid-1970s. That stay exposed her to people who lived on the fringes of society and introduced her to the complexity of race, gender and politics, Matlock says.

Matlock is teaching a sophomore tutorial this year, and offering several eye-catching courses, including French 151: "Dangerous Bodies and Lady Killers: Criminality and Gender in 19th Century French Culture and History" and French 152: "19th Century: Museums and the Novel."

Slated for next year, among other courses, is French 260: "Madness, Perversion, and Pathology: Freud and the French." The class will explore Freud in relation to his French predecessors.

Now that she here at Harvard, Matlock is as determined as ever to make a difference, to make the University a more egalitarian institution. Matlock says she would like to see more support for young women scholars, and she would like to make cultural studies and the humanies a bigger priority at Harvard.