Mary Ellen Birkett, a specialist in French literature and culture of the early nineteenth century, is the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Duras's Ourika; co-editor of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Ancient and Modern Worlds; author of Lamartine and the Poetics of Landscape, of chapters in Cabeen's Bibliography of Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Relire Lamartine Aujourd'hui, Approaches to Teaching Stendhal's The Red and The Black, Approaches to Rousseau's Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and co-author of a chapter in Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers. She has contributed numerous entries to The Romantic Movement: A Selected and Critical Bibliography and has written for journals such as French Colonial History, The French Review,The Hawaiian Journal of History, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Romance Notes, Romance Quarterly and Romantisme.

Birkett directed the Smith Junior Year Abroad Program in Paris in 1985–86 and the Smith Junior Year Abroad in Geneva in 1987–88, 1992–94 and 1997–98.