Tili Boon Cuillé

Tili Boon Cuillé earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. She is Director of Undergraduate Studies in French, Director of the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon, Faculty Fellow for William Greenleaf Eliot Residential College, and a member of the MLA Division Executive Committee for Eighteenth-Century French Literature. Her area of specialization is eighteenth-century French literature and aesthetics, particularly the debates about the musical, visual, and performing arts. She has taught graduate and undergraduate seminars entitled “Pedestrian Paris,” “Philosophical Fictions,” “Enlightenment Energy: Comedy, Eroticism and the Grotesque,” “Art, Revolution, and Society,” “Women of Letters,” and “Voices of Dissent: Enlightenment Principle and Social Protest.” She also teaches courses on Opera Studies for the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities.

Professor Cuillé is the author of Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (Toronto, 2006). She has also written several articles on literature and music, including “From the Comédie-Française to the Opéra: Figaro at the Crossroads” for the volume Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries (Ashgate, 2006), “Revoicing Rousseau: Staël’s Corinne and the Song of the South” for the volume Phrase and Subject: Studies in Music and Literature (Legenda, 2006), and “La Vraisemblance du merveilleux: Operatic Aesthetics in Cazotte’s Fantastic Fiction” for the journal Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Enchanted Enlightenment: French Ventures in Fiction, Imagery, and Stagecraft. Situated at the nexus of science, religion, and natural philosophy, this study reconsiders the French Enlightenment from the standpoint of literary criticism and cultural history, focusing on the popular genres of opera, the Ossian epics, oriental tales, and gothic fiction.