New Plan II Director, Dr. Alexandra Wettlaufer

Plan II is pleased to announce Dr. Alexandra K. Wettlaufer as our new Director, following Dr. Michael Stoff who served as the program director for the past 11 years. Dr. Wettlaufer has been the Plan II Associate Director since 2005, overseeing the program’s senior thesis course and developing a deep love for the program and our students.

She is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, specializing in 19th-century literature, visual arts, culture, and gender studies. A recipient of a 2014-15 Guggenheim Fellowship, Dr. Wettlaufer is currently working on a book project entitled “Reading George: Sand, Eliot and the Novel in France and Britain, 1830-1900.”

She is the author of three previous books: Pen vs Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post-Revolutionary France (2001), In the Mind’s Eye: The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin (2003), and Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800-1860(2011).  She has published numerous articles on Balzac, Sand, Baudelaire, Zola, Manet, Ruskin, Turner, Berlioz, Grandville, and Flora Tristan; her article “She is Me: Tristan, Gauguin, and the Dialectics of Colonial Identity” (Romanic Review,2007) was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Essay Prize, Honorable Mention.

Dr. Wettlaufer has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, ACLS, Bourse Marandon, the Clark Art Institute, and the National Humanities Center.  Her teaching awards include a President’s Associates’ Teaching Award, the Blunk Memorial Professorship in Teaching and Advising, a Raymond Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching Award, a Liberal Arts Council Teaching Award, and University Coop Award for Undergraduate Thesis Advising.

She is the Co-Editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal and serves on the Editorial Boards of European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Studies, George Sand Studies, and Dix-Neuf. Dr. Wettlaufer has also served on the Advisory Boards of the American Comparative Literature Association, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.  Dr. Wettlaufer is a core faculty member of Comparative Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, and European Studies.