Barbara Abrams is Professor of French and Women's and Gender Studies and is Chair of the Department of History, Language, and Global Culture at Suffolk University, Boston. Her academic work focuses on French literature of the Enlightenment and Women's and Gender Studies. Her recent publications include several articles on women's epistolary writing in eighteenth-century France, the Factum as Fiction, and a new critical focus on the novels of Marie-Madeleine Bonafon. Her previous books include a multigraph project titled Reframing Rousseau's Le Lévite d'Ephraïm: The Hebrew Bible, Hospitality, and Modern Identity (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment) and Le Bizarre and Le Décousu in the Novels and Theoretical Works of Denis Diderot: How the Idea of Marginality Originated in Eighteenth-Century France, which examines the background of our modern concept of marginality by focusing on Diderot's materialist philosophy.