Teaching
Selected Teaching
French 225: Dealing with Death in Francophone Lit and Media (undergrad)
The thief and vagabond François Villon, a French Medieval poet, became famous for his writings on death. Ousmane Sembène, a twentieth-century Senegalese writer, recounts the story of a poor man who rides the bus to the cemetery, carrying his dead child. The Guadaloupean author Maryse Condé creates the portrait of an outsider whose life and death are told by a series of different visitors who attend his wake. In this course, we will consider a broad range of literary, cultural, and filmic texts by French and Francophone authors from the Middle Ages to the late 20th century whose primary concern is death. In addition to analyzing French texts in translation, we will also look at a few English-language texts to provide a comparative perspective. In doing so, we investigate how these authors and their characters understand, approach, rationalize, engage with, and are emotionally involved with the topic of death.
French 229: Comparative Immigrant Cultural Production (undergrad)
This course explores the cultural production of contemporary immigrant populations, focusing primarily on communities in France, Italy, and the US. Interdisciplinary in nature, this course borrows from different fields, most notably sociolinguistics, migrant studies, identity studies, and cultural studies. We will consider a broad range of literary (short stories, memoirs, novels) and cultural texts (films, art, music) that emerge from interactions between immigrant groups and host countries. The aim of the course is to inform students of the processes of identity (re)construction that migrants undergo when in a new environment.
French 304: Issues and Perspectives in French and Francophone Studies (undergrad)
What are “French and Francophone Studies?” What are the objects of this field (e.g., literature, cinema, and the arts, but also foodways, environmental attitudes, media [old and new], politics, etc.)? What, in fact, do we mean when we use the terms “France” (the nation, including its overseas departments and territories), “French” (the language, the people), and “francophone” (literally, French-speaking, but often implying people “from outside of France,” the former colonies of France and Belgium, and sometimes even racial/religious difference)? What are the forms of knowledge and the types of skills that a student majoring or minoring in French can expect to acquire? This course aims to provide answers to those questions by giving students an opportunity to begin to acquire that knowledge and apply the skills in question.
French 320: French Language and Cultural Identity (undergrad)
This course explores the French language as social practice in which speakers’ notions of identity influence how they use language, and language, in turn, impacts conceptions of personal, cultural, and national identity. Interdisciplinary in nature, this course borrows from different fields, most notably linguistics, philosophy, and French cultural studies. The aim of the course is to inform students of the social aspects of the evolution of the French language, highlight the dynamic relationship between language and identity, and present a detailed picture of linguistic and cultural diversity in the Francophone world.
French 378: The Making of Contemporary France (undergrad)
This course probes the development of contemporary France by considering the moments and documents that complicate narratives of a unified cultural space. It does this by examining how the idea of France is problematized internally by a number of opposing tendencies: its equally important revolutionary and reactionary political traditions; its determined monolingualism and, in spite of it all, thriving minor languages; its credo of a singular culture (Republicanism) in the face of ascendant multiculturalism; its anti-immigrant reflexes and its global cultural and economic ambitions. We will do so by examining a variety of types of texts: historical, political, literary, cinematic, televisual, etc.
French 448: Cultures of Franco-America (mixed grad/undergrad)
In this course, we will consider a broad range of literary and cultural texts that emerge out of the long history of the French in North America and of Americans in France. Our readings will include novels, poetry, and short stories—such as the earliest known work of African American fiction, written in French and published in Paris in 1837. Alongside these literary texts produced by French writers in America and American expatriates in France, we will consider travel narratives and missionary accounts describing interactions between European and Native American populations; historical, ethnographic, and political writings; as well as popular cultural forms such as music, comic strips, and films. Throughout the quarter, our discussions will focus on the politics of representation—which is to say that we will work to understand the processes through which categories of race are shaped over time through the interplay between Anglo- and Franco-American cultures and ideologies, even as these categories are challenged from the perspectives of minority populations. As we trace these processes of racialization, we will be particularly attentive to intersections between race and class, gender, and sexuality; at the same time, we will consider the ways in which all of these categories of identity are inflected by language, by regional and national forms of belonging and exclusion, and by the presence of “mixed-race” communities.
French 590: Qualitative Research Methods (grad)
Both theoretical and practical, this course covers the fundamentals of qualitative research methods. Students will design and implement a small-scale qualitative study. Students will collect different forms of qualitative data (field notes, interviews, participant observation), explore data analysis, learn how to code data qualitatively, and present their findings. This course is geared toward graduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences.