Katherine Stephenson
Katherine Stephenson
Katherine Stephenson, PhD, passed away on October 13th, 2025. She received her PhD in French from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to UNC Charlotte, Dr. Stephenson taught French at the University of Mississippi. She joined our department in 1987 and taught in the French program until her retirement in 2018. She served on countless University committees and helped shape the French program. Katherine was involved with interdisciplinary programs such as Liberal Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies.
In her nearly 30 years at UNC Charlotte she has taught all the core courses in French and developed French for Reading Knowledge and French Women Writers in Translation. She co-developed the Limoges Study Abroad Program in French. She has been a leader in integrating technology into the curriculum and all her courses are now hybrid courses. She helped establish the Language Resource Center in 1990 and was regularly on the departmental LRC advisory committees. She was a founding member of the Master’s in Liberal Studies program, in which she taught Language, Gender and Power, the inaugural course in the program. In the WGST and MALS programs she regularly taught Queer Theory, Theoretical Approaches to Sexuality, and Language, Gender and Power. She was the Graduate Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies from 2010 to 2015. She has published on feminist theory, French women writers, and language and gender. She worked on the international research project “Différence sexuelle et communication(s)” (Sexual Difference and Communication) directed by French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray and has co-translated Irigaray’s Sexes et genres à travers les langues (Sexes and Genders across Languages with Gail Schwab (Hofstra). Dit de femmes: entretiens d’écrivaines françaises (Women’s Words: Interviews with French Women Writers), the anthology of interviews with contemporary French women writers she conducted along with Michèle Magill (NCSU), was published in 2003 by Summa Publications.