Christie McDonald is the Smith Professor emerita of French Language and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor emerita of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. A literary historian, as well as cultural critic and theorist, McDonald has worked on eighteenth and twentieth to twenty-first-century French thought and literature in a comparative context. She has also published in the areas of literature and philosophy, anthropology, feminist theory, and the arts (music and painting).
McDonald is the author or editor of many books and over a hundred articles and chapters in an interdisciplinary context. Among her publications: author of the 18th century section, 1715-1793,Femmes, littérature. Une histoire culturelle (Gallimard, 2020). Rousseau and Freedom (ed. with Stanley Hoffmann, Cambridge University Press, 2010); French Global: A New Approach to French Literary History (ed. with Susan Suleiman, 2010; French translation French Global; Une nouvelle perspective sur l’histoire littéraire, 2014); Proust and the Arts (ed. with François Proulx, 2015).McDonald’s other publications include The Extravagant Shepherd (1973, 2006) on Rousseau; The Dialogue of Writing (1985) on Rousseau and Diderot; Dispositions (1986) on music and text; and The Proustian Fabric (1991). As co-editor, L'Oreille de l'autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions. Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida (with Claude Lévesque, 1982), English trans., The Ear of the Other 1988; and Transformations: The Languages of Culture and Personhood after Theory(with Gary Wihl, 1994).
McDonald has also published books on American painters in her family: Images of Congo: Anne Eisner's Art and Ethnology, 1946-58 (2005); Painting My World: The Art of Dorothy Eisner (2009). The Life and Art of Anne Eisner: An American Artist Between Cultures (2020).
From 2000-2006, McDonald served as Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and from 2010-2017, she and her husband, Michael Rosengarten, were Masters/Faculty Deans at Mather House.