Michèle Longino was a professor of French studies in the department of romance studies at Duke University. She was an early modern scholar focused on the French Classical age, 1650–1700. She published Performing Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence. Her second book, on classical theater and orientalism in the context of French-Ottoman relations, Orientalism in French Classical Drama was awarded Honorable Mention for the MLA Scaglione Prize. Her last research has focused on the genre of travel writing and Mediterranean travel accounts from the classical period, and resulted in her third book, French Travel Writing and the Ottoman Empire: Marseilles to Constantinople, 1650–1700. She was examining the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the fables of La Fontaine, both 17th-century writers of the French classical period. Michèle Longino died in November 2024 in North Carolina.