Rate My Professor Laure Katsaros

Laure Katsaros serves as the G. Armour Craig Professor in Language and Literature and Chair of the French Department at Amherst College, where she has been a faculty member since 2002. Prior to her tenure at Amherst, she taught French at Boston College, English at Université Paris Nord XIII, and American Studies at Université Aix-Marseille I. Her academic background includes a Thèse de doctorat in American Studies from Université Paris 7 (2001), a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University (2003), an M.Des. in History and Philosophy of Design from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (2015)—for which she received the Gerald M. McCue Medal for Highest Academic Achievement—and studies at École Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm, Paris).

Katsaros's research specializes in literary modernity, the avant-garde, urban transformation, and utopian architecture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employing an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates history and culture. She has also translated contemporary American poets into French. Her notable publications include Un Nouveau Monde Amoureux: Célibataires et prostituées au dix-neuvième siècle (Éditions Galaade, 2010), which examines the interplay between bachelorhood and prostitution in nineteenth-century France and garnered reviews in French media such as Libération and features on France Culture radio, with an Arabic translation published in 2016; New York-Paris: Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City (University of Michigan Press, 2012), analyzing poetic responses to emerging visual cultures like dioramas and photography; and the co-edited volume Multiplicity: On Constraint and Agency in Contemporary Architecture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024). She is currently advancing her book manuscript Glass Architectures: Charles Fourier and the Utopia of Collective Self-Surveillance, developed from her master's thesis supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's New Directions Fellowship ($262,500, 2014). Additionally, she delivered the Max and Etta Lazerowitz Lecture in 2007.