MasanoYamashita

  • Associate Professor
  • FRENCH
Address

HUMN 329

Office Hours

Spring 2026
Thursday 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Virtual hours by appointment
Please email masano.yamashita@colorado.edu for Zoom meeting link.

Biography

Masano Yamashita received her BA from King’s College London and her MA and Ph.D. from New York University. She specializes in the literature and culture of the French eighteenth century.She is co-editor of Frameworks of Time in Rousseau(2023, Routledge) and author of Jean-Jacques Rousseau face au public: problèmes d’identité(Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2017).Her work has also appeared in L’Esprit créateur, Orbis litterarum, Forum for Modern Language Studies, European Drama and Performance Studiesand edited collections.She currently serves on the advisory board of Eighteenth-Century Studiesand the scholarly advisory board of Oxford University Studies of the Enlightenment. She is president of the Rousseau Association and past president of the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.She is currently interested in women writers, activists and performers of the long eighteenth-century, Enlightenment social debates on merit and inequality, and philosophy as lived experience.

At CU she co-organizes the Albertine French Film Festival with Jason Phelps (International Film Series).

Masano Yamashita’s course offerings at CU include the undergraduate seminar Liberty, sex and death: moral dilemmas in early modern French culture, a graduate seminar on The Enlightenment’s Dangerous Women, and a culture course on French fashion.

Publications

Books:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau face au public: problèmes d'identité(Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2017.

Frameworks of Time in Rousseau, eds. Jason Neidleman and Masano Yamashita, Routledge Studies in Cultural History, 2023.

Recent Articles and Book Chapters:

“Playthings of Fortune: Lots and Inequality in l’abbé Prévost,”Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France, eds. Reginald McGinnis and Fayçal Falaky, Bucknell University Press, 2021, p. 64-81.

“Selfhood in the Early Finance Capitalism ofManon Lescaut,”Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 56, issue 4, 2020, p. 468-480.

“Destiny’s Child: Accidents and Repetition inLa vie de Marianne,”Orbis Litterarum, vol. 75, issue 3, June 2020, p. 103-113.

“Julie, or the New Eloise,” inThe Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel,1660-1820, ed. April London, Cambridge University Press, in production

“Laconism and the Literary Politics of theSocial Contract,”Silence, implicite et non-dit chez Rousseau/ Silence, the implicit and the unspoken in Rousseau,ed. Brigitte Weltman-Aron, Ourida Mostefai, Peter Westmoreland, Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2020.

“Fate and Consolation in the Late Rousseau,”Sens Public, September issue, 2019. accessible at

“Rousseau and the mechanical life,”Rousseau, between Nature and Culture: Philosophy, Literature and Politics,eds. Anne Deneys-Tunney and Yves Zarka. Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2016, p. 67-81.

“Poverty as Spectacle: Marivaux’s Beggars and Chance in Enlightenment Paris,”L’Esprit Créateur, 55.3 (Fall 2015): p. 59-71.

“Mute Performances: Silence and Deafness in Diderot’s Theater Criticism,”European Drama and Performance Studies,n˚2, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2014, p. 307-325.

“Le philosophe et ses masques: statut du visible et mise en scène de la sincérité chez Rousseau,”Rousseau et le spectacle, eds. Jacques Berchtold, Christophe Martin, Yannick Séïté. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014, p. 371-385.

“Love as habituation in Rousseau,”L’Esprit Créateur, 52.4 (Winter 2012), p. 55-67.

“The Revolutionary Return of the Orator: Public Space and the Spoken Word in the Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,”Rousseau and Revolution,eds. Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup. London and New York: Continuum Studies on Political Philosophy, now Bloomsbury Press, 2011, p. 161-174.

Blog: ,May 3, 2017