Dr. Stipa received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1986. Since that time she has been teaching French and German in the Department of Modern Languages at St Lawrence. During her tenure in the department and as frequent director of the university's program in Rouen, Dr. Stipa collaborated with her colleagues to shift the primarily European emphasis of the French program to a more inclusive Francophone perspective: on-campus offerings now include courses on African and Caribbean literature and culture and the Rouen program features an African component complemented by a field trip to Senegal.

Dr. Stipa research focuses on individual, collective and national identity constructions, their cultural context and socio-political implications. She has presented papers on such diverse authors as Goethe, Heine, Kleist, Stendhal, Flaubert, Bachmann and Schneider at the Modern Language Association as well as at other international and national conferences. Her articles appear in such prestigious journals as the Goethe Yearbook, Seminar, Studies in Short Fiction and Monatshefte; they are quoted in professional journals, encyclopedias, monographs and Internet publications.