In the Footsteps of Gita May

Abstract

In 1988, when I was in search of a dissertation topic to feel enthusiastic about, I took Gita May's course on Rousseau. Professor May (as I called her at the time) introduced Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by discussing the concept of perfectibility--as Rousseau saw it, a key distinction between humans and animals. Something clicked for me. Was that the reason I was there? The search for perfectibility, not in an institution, or in a mentor, or in a field, but rather as a process, an aspiration, the goal behind ideas, the inspiration for our learning. In class, Professor May shared her fascination with the paradoxes and contradictions in Rousseau's writing, and outside class, I devoured Rousseau's work and Rousseau criticism. By the end of the semester, I had found a dissertation topic. I had also found a guide and a friend in Gita May. I learned a lot about perfectibility from Professor May. When early drafts of my dissertation came back two days after submission covered with red-ink comments, I learned how imperfect my writing was. Gita pointed out that giving a presentation with a pained grimace was not the best way to engage one's audience. I learned that perfectibility was not perfection. The closest to perfection one could get was to be found in a Hubert Robert landscape, in a portrait by Vigee Le Brun, in the dynamism of a Chardin still life made present through Diderot's words and the reader's imagination. Perfectibility was about trying to get there. Gita May was a trailblazer who, like many women of her generation, had to do more to achieve the same status as men in her profession. Among the roles and honors she held were president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, member of the MLA's Executive Council, and chevalier in the Legion d'Honneur, as well as recipient of Guggenheim, Ful-bright, American Council of Learned Societies, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Her work was wide ranging and made connections between philosopbes and revolutionaries, beyond centuries, and between genres. Most revealing of her spirit were the approaches she adopted in her work: rather than focus on the engagement and iconoclasm of Voltaire, the Patriarch, she explored Diderot's experimentalism and regard for outsiders, the idealism of Rousseau as read by Madame Roland and other women writers, and Baudelaire's aspiration to the immortal through his writings on painting. Gita May knew and communicated to her students that perfectibility as a scholar was all about determination and rigor. Yet it is her generosity of spirit that I remember most about her. She did not seek to cultivate acolytes who would replicate her own approaches, but rather helped her students develop their scholarly voices and individual paths (whether within or outside academia). When I spent a year in Paris, Gita May encouraged me to seek outside advisors and helped me make contact with my DEA director at the Universite de Paris III. …