Harriet Stone received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. Her research interests include seventeenth-century French studies; studies are interdisciplinary: she focuses on art and literature; text and image; science and literature;aesthetics in early modern Europe and; literature and and the formation of knowledge ethics. Her books include Tables of Knowledge: Descartes in Vermeer's Studio (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006), The Classical Model: Literature and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996), and Royal DisClosure: Problematics of Representation in French Classical Tragedy (Birmingham: Summa Publications, 1987). In addition, she served as co-translator with Gerhild Scholz Williams of Pierre de Lancre, On the Inconstancy of Witches (1612) (Tempe: Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006). She also edited Racine: A Tricentennial Issue. Esprit Créateur 38.2 (Summer 1998).

Prof. Stone's current research focuses on interconnections between texts and paintings at Versailles under Louis XIV and also in the Dutch Republic. Examining the court's promotion of the king, the role of art and the artist, and the activities of the middle class, she extends the notion of seventeenth-century culture beyond France's nobility to the French bourgeois and the thriving merchant class in Holland depicted by Vermeer and his contemporaries.

Prof. Stone's courses include seminars on the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Molière as they relate to the court ceremonies staged at Versailles; public and private lives in seventeenth-century fiction and history; Paris in literature, film, and photography; and surveys of French literature. She regularly teaches in the Comparative Literature program, offering courses on literature and ethics, the city, and also The Birth of Venus, a course for freshmen and sophomores on Renaissance Italy co-taught with Prof. William Wallace of Art History. Prof. Stone serves as Director of the Master of Liberal Arts program at University College, for which she also teaches regularly.