Joan DeJean is Trustee Professor of French.  She specializes in 17th- and 18th-century French literature.  She has published on the history of women's writing in France (Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France, 1991); the history of sexuality (Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937, 1989); the development of the novel (Literary Fortifications, 1984); and the cultural history of late 17th- and early 18th-century France (Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle, 1996; The Essence of Style, 2005).

She received a Lindback award for Distinguished Teaching and was the winner of the 2003 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for her book The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (U of Chicago P, 2002).