Brigitte Stepanov

Dr. Brigitte Stepanov is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies. She is the founder and director of the Energy Today Lab, an interdisciplinary energy humanities lab engaged in research, pedagogy, and service with support from the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), and the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE). She is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies within the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and co-director of the African Studies minor (reach out to her or to Dr. Ippolito to learn more). Multifaceted inquiry drawing on multiple disciplines is at the heart of Dr. Stepanov’s research, teaching, and creative work. Trained as a humanities scholar and as a mathematician, she holds degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada and a PhD from Brown University. At Brown, she was a Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and received the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence. Before coming to Georgia Tech, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of French and Arabic at Grinnell College. At Georgia Tech, she has received the CTL Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2025 and the ML Excellence in Teaching Award in 2026.

She is completing two concurrent monographs that examine distinct literary, legal, and philosophical understandings of war and punishment. Her first book, Cruelty: Reading the In-Human, investigates the ways in which transformations in warfare have coincided with evolving perceptions of human-ness over the past century. Tracing a philosophical genealogy of cruelty from Classical Rome to The Theory of the Drone, the book places literary analysis of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Maïssa Bey, Salim Bachi, and contemporary poetry from current war zones in conversations with interlocutors including Montaigne, Locke, Nietzsche, and Mbembe. Her analyses reveal how cruelty shapes ideas from the 20th and 21st centuries regarding the boundaries of “regular” martial violence and definitions of the “human.” Her second monograph in process, The Form of Genocide: Reckoning with the Ethics of Recounting, examines representations of the Holocaust and the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, through close readings of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, Gilbert Gatore, Marguerite Duras, Robert Antelme, and Maurice Blanchot. Reading these authors alongside archival accounts of both victims and perpetrators, the book considers works at the borders of fiction and testimony and the ethics of narrativizing atrocity. Research related to Cruelty and The Form of Genocide has been supported by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University, the Human Rights Archive at the Rubenstein Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, the Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives (IMEC) in Caen, France, and the National Endowment for the Humanities through the seminar “The Search for Humanity after Atrocity.”

This work is closely tied to her second research project (and third book), Irradiated Space-time: Five Vignettes on this Nuclear Present. This work examines literary, artistic, and cultural responses to radioactive fallout and its ensuing ecological crises following France’s nuclear arsenal testing and how so-called civilian nuclear infrastructure can be militarized. She is also co-editing a special volume for SubStance titled “The Atomic Now: Technopolitics and Aesthetics of the Nuclear Age” on an adjacent topic.

Dr. Stepanov’s recent scholarship has appeared, or is forthcoming, in journals and collected volumes including Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, The French Review, Voix plurielles, Violence: An International Journal, Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East, Seeing in Tongues: Modern Languages and Visual Culture, and HEFNU’s Lessons and Legacies: Rethinking Paradigms. Among other venues, her photography has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography (TX), the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago (IL), the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and AS220 in Providence (RI), and l’Association Carrefour in Metz, France. Her exhibit “Why I’ll Always Dream of Poland,” whose first iteration was supported by a grant from the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown, sheds light on memorialization and its rituals. The project reflects on both personal and collective loss, concentrating on the gaps between private and public mourning in the wake of atrocity. Throughout both her visual and textual work, she asks what it means (ethically, aesthetically, affectively) to remember historically situated places and moments and to (re)tell the stories of humans, non-human animals, plants, and objects – from patches of lichen to the detailed brickwork of a monument to her own family’s history.

Her other activities include translation (the Derrida Seminar Translation Project and the work of Peter Szendy and Laura Odello). She is also trained in conflict mediation, having most recently taken part in the Peacebuilding Institute hosted by the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at EMU.

Find out more about her work here and here. 

Short Bio:

Brigitte Stepanov is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She writes and teaches about how categories of being, knowledge, and aesthetic forms are altered by extreme violence against life and land and, in turn, how ontologies and epistemologies are shaped by atrocity. She has two monographs in process. The first, Cruelty: Reading the In-Human, focuses on the intersections of literary, legal, and philosophical understandings of cruelty and their power to shift what we know as the “human.” The second, The Form of Genocide: Reckoning with the Ethics of Recounting, examines representations of the Holocaust and the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, considering works at the borders of fiction and testimony and the ethics of narrativizing atrocity. Her recent scholarship has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, The French Review, Voix plurielles, Violence: An International Journal, Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East, Seeing in Tongues: Modern Languages and Visual Culture, and HEFNU’s Lessons and Legacies: Rethinking Paradigms. She is also the founder and director of the Energy Today Lab, an interdisciplinary energy in-humanities lab engaged in research, pedagogy, and service. In 2025, she received Georgia Tech’s institute-wide CTL Junior Faculty Teaching Award and, in 2026, the ML Excellence in Teaching Award.