News

Sponsored by the Alliance Française de Berkeley and the Delegation of Québec in Los Angeles, plan to attend two fantastic events honoring this year's region of choice: Québec!

Thursday, March 16: Screening of the Québécois feature film "Au revoir le bonheur" (comedy) by Ken Scott
The event will be in French.
Event details can be found HERE

The French Department has received a grant from the French Embassy and the French-American Cultural Exchange in Education and Arts Foundation to develop professional pathways for learners of French at UC Berkeley. The two-year project’s aim is to help students deepen their French oral and written skills and cultural understanding while gaining professional experience in two professional domains: International Relations and the Art World and Cultural Institutions.

Each semester the Department awards the Mousseau Prize for best undergraduate essay in French. For Fall 2022, we are happy to announce that the award goes to David Villani! His paper, which was written for Prof. Déborah Blocker’s class on Religious Fanaticism, Toleration, and Laïcité, is entitled “'Article d’exportation': L’implémentation des lois laïques dans le Sénégal colonial.” The Mousseau prize comes with an award of $200. Congratulations David!

In 2023, we will mark the twentieth anniversary of the passing of the lesbian activist, writer and philosopher Monique Wittig (1935-2003), as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of her Corps lesbien, with a two-part international conference: « Monique Wittig : Twenty Years Later / Monique Wittig : Vingt ans après ».

UC Berkeley's own Caroline Godard, a doctoral student in the French Ph.D. program, recently found her work to be published in the Early Modern French Studies. For readers and researchers entranced by Montaigne, this article is the ideal read. Congratulations, Caroline!

Title: Being ‘time-bound’: Montaigne on Touch, Contagion, and the Contemporary

Abstract:

Warm congratulations to Tony Soyka on his retirement, which was celebrated with a jam session (including songs by Tony himself) in Ishi Court on June 9. Thank you, Tony, for your seven years of service as Undergraduate Advisor in Comparative Literature, and your two years of doubling up in French as well! We, and our students, have a lot to be thankful for. We wish you all the best in this next phase, and hope you will come back to visit!

On May 2, 2022 the French Department held a celebration in honor of Distinguished Professor Emeritus David Hult's career, with special invited speakers who were former students.

Mary Franklin-Brown (Christ’s College, University of Cambridge) presented “The Architecture of Song,” in which she examined two sets of architectural remains—the Chertsey tile and the ducal hall built for Richard Cœur de Lion in Poitiers—in the light of lyric form and Pythagorean harmony.

On Sunday April 10, the French Department set out to animate an otherwise sleepy campus morning by bringing politics and coffee to Dwinelle Hall’s Library of French Thought. The first round of France’s presidential election was announced at 11:00 AM PST. Leading up to the announcement, conversation percolated into beamish or bleak anticipation for France’s five years ahead.

We are sad to report that Professor Emeritus Leo Bersani died on February 20, 2022.

Dr. Margot Szarke, a long-time lecturer and researcher, was recently awarded the 2021 Society of Dix-Neuvièmistes Publication Prize for the article "Modern Sensitivity: Émile Zola's Synaesthetic Cheeses."

First-year language coordinator Dr. Daniel Hoffmann has been selected from more than 500 nominees as a recipient of the Campus's "Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times" award. Thank you, Daniel, for the innovation and creativity you've helped bring to our program during these disruptive times!

Congratulations to Debarati Sanyal on the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her book project, Arts of the Border: Voices of Displacement at the Edges of Europe! Read about Professor Sanyal and the three other Berkeley Guggenheim awardees in the Daily Cal. The announcement of the fellows can be found here.

2013 Ph.D. Maya Angela Smith, currently Associate Professor of French at the University of Washington, has just been named co-winner of the 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for her book Senegal Abroad! Read the award announcement here!

Congratulations to this year’s winners of the Mousseau Undergraduate Prizes In French!

Outstanding Honors Thesis in French:

Hannah Cox — “Armen Lubin: Pour une poésie autoréflexive” (Thesis Director:  Professor Karl Britto)

Best Undergraduate Paper in French:

Arianne Marcellin-Little —  “Le Chœur de la cour: La libération et la domination à travers les divertissements pastoraux à la cour de Louis XIV” (for Prof. Déborah Blocker)

To: Our Spring 2020 Graduates in French:

From: Chair Paige and the Faculty, Lecturers and Staff in French

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