Michèle Longino, professor emerita of romance studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, passed away on November 21. She was 77 years old.
Dr. Longino’s career began serving in the Peace Corps in Somalia. She transitioned to academia in 1984 as an assistant professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She joined the faculty at Duke University in 1989, where she remained for the next three decades. Throughout her long tenure, she held several key leadership roles, including academic director of the EDUCO consortium (Tulane, Emory, Cornell, Duke Universities in France), director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies, and chair of the department of romance studies. She also had two stints as a visiting professor at Venice International University in Italy.
A scholar of seventeenth-century French literature, Dr. Longino conducted extensive research on the intersection of gender and literature, the epistolary genre, French drama, French travel writing, and the Ottoman Empire. She was the author of several books, including her most recent, French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire: Marseilles to Constantinople 1650-1700 (Routledge, 2015).
Born in Paris and raised in the United States, Dr. Longino received her bachelor’s degree from what is now Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. She held a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.