Professor Mostefai Honored by the L'Ordre des Palmes Académiques

Professor Ourida Mostefai, Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown, has been honored by the French Society, L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques with a promotion to the rank of Officer. The awarding of the promotion and associated decoration will take place in a ceremony on September 6, 2017, at the French Consul’s residence, in Cambridge, Mass.

l'Ordre purple ribbon L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques was established in 1808 by Napoléon in order to honor excellence in French education. The Palmes Académiques is the oldest non-military French decoration.

There are three ranks for those recognized, and each receives a decoration as follows:

Commandeur – a medallion worn on a necklet
Officier — a medallion worn on a ribbon with rosette on the left breast
Chevalier — a medallion worn on a ribbon on the left breast

Professor Mostefai was named a Chevalier in the Order in 2009. She joined the faculty at Brown in 2015, having previously served as Professor and Department Chair in the Romance Languages & Literatures Department at Boston College. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University, and a Licence de Lettres from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is the author of two books on Rousseau (Le Citoyen de Genève et la République des Lettres and Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique) as well as numerous articles on the French Enlightenment. Professor Mostefai is the co-editor of Rousseau and l’Infâme: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment and Approaches to Teaching Rousseau’s “Confessions” and “Rêveries” and has edited Lectures de la Nouvelle Héloïse. The four recipients with the French Consul

Her fields of research include 18th-century French literature and philosophy, the French Revolution, and critical digital scholarship. As of July 1, Professor Mostefai is serving as the Director of the Centre D’Excellence within Brown’s Cogut Center for the Humanities.