Camille Leclère-Gregory

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Director of the Institut d'Avignon
Undergraduate Advisor (Sophomores and Juniors)
Camille Leclère-Gregory headshot

Contact

clecleregr@brynmawr.edu
610-526-5491
Old Library 145
Office Hours
M/W 10:00am-11:00am
CV (PDF)

Department/Subdepartment

Education

Ph.D. University of Iowa
M.A. Université Bordeaux-Montaigne
B.A. Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour

Areas of Focus

17th-century literature and culture, Theater Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies.

Biography

Camille Leclère-Gregory is an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at Bryn Mawr College. Her teaching and research explore how cultural forms – literary, theatrical, and social – construct, reinforce, and sometimes threaten systems of power. Her work centers on seventeenth-century France, examining how representations of non-conforming and transgressive figures expose the tension between individual agency and collective order. By studying both theatrical texts and the broader social structures that shaped them, she explores how the performance of hierarchy, prestige, and gender became essential to the organization of Early Modern society.

Her publications have appeared in Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, Symposium, The French Review, and L’Esprit Créateur. Her current book project, Under the Influence: How Louis XIV’s Court Society Shaped Contemporary Western Culture, extends this inquiry beyond the Early Modern period. Drawing on sociological, political, and feminist theory, it traces how the spectacle of Louis XIV’s court produced enduring models of visibility, prestige, and distinction – structures which continue to shape today’s economies of influence, from celebrity culture to politics, fashion, and digital media.

Through her teaching and scholarship, she seeks to shed light on the social imagination that links past and present: how rebellion and conformity are staged, how authority performs itself, and how alternative voices challenge the norms that define belonging and power.

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