Education

Peter Shoemaker received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University in 1997, where he was a Jacob Javitts Fellow and the recipient of a French Government Fellowship (Bourse Chateaubriand), which allowed him to study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1994-5.

Teaching

Before coming to CUA in 2000, he taught at Princeton University and Macalester College. At CUA, he has taught numerous courses French language, literature, and culture at the graduate and undergraduate level and in the Honors Program. Courses that he developed/redesigned include: "French 317: Versailles, the Architecture of Power," “French 322: Love, Family, and Marriage in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Literature.” and "French 301: Reading, Writing, and Talking about Literature in French." In addition to his teaching and advising, Dr. Shoemaker has led six groups of honors students to Paris over Spring Break and is the co-founder of a five-week summer program there.

Research and Publications

He has published primarily in the field of seventeenth-century French literature. Areas of special interest include: rhetoric and literature, the social history of literature, material culture, and computers and textual editing.  His book Powerful Connections: The Poetics of Patronage in the Age of Louis XIII was released by the University of Delaware Press in 2007 and his articles have appeared in Papers in French Seventeenth-Century French Literature, French Forum, The French Review, Oeuvres et critiques, Cahiers du dix-septième, Nottingham French Studies, and Seventeenth-Century French Studies. He is currently working on an edition of Claude de Villiers’s gastronomic play Les Costeaux (1665) and a monograph on confidentiality in the French novel.