I’m a graduate student in the 2025 cohort. I’m interested in translation studies, second-wave feminism, and feminist sociolinguistics, especially second wave writers whose texts experiment with language and think about women’s space within the French language and their access to the literary sphere.
This PhD program is my (very happy) return to Cal after completing my undergraduate degree here in 2023. I studied Comparative Literature and French with a minor in Applied Language Studies and wrote an honors thesis under the direction of Professor Maya Sidhu on “Le Rire de la Méduse”...
I started my PhD in French at the University of California, Berkeley in Fall 2024. I am originally from Tours, in France’s Loire Valley, a region known for its châteaux, wine, cheese, and remarkable concentration of literary figures such as Balzac and Rabelais. I will leave it to others to determine which of these cultural contributions has had the greatest historical significance.
Before arriving at Berkeley, I earned an M.A. in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of Tours in France....
I work on nineteenth through twenty-first century French literature. I am writing a dissertation titled “Le Style de l’homme pour l’homme: Male Homosexuality, Antiquity and the French Literary Imaginary, 1860-1990.” I argue that in this period, French authors write same-sex sexual practices with an ear to what makes them linguistically specific. Take, for example, the phrase les deux amants s’embrassèrent:how can we make clear that it’s two men who are involved? How have authors made the most of the very fact this needs to be clarified? My dissertation traces the new...
I am a Ph.D. candidate in French at the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Film and Media. My research examines postcolonial representations of French citizens of immigrant origin, with a particular focus on the North African diaspora, through questions of belonging, space, movement, and identity in contemporary French and Francophone cultural production. Bringing together French and Francophone Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Cultural Studies, my work considers how literature, cinema, television, and emerging forms of serialized...
Carla Floccari is a first-year PhD student in French. After attending a Classe Préparatoire Littéraire, she obtained a BA and an MA in French Literature from the Sorbonne, graduating with honors in 2024.
Carla's Master II thesis, entitled Révéler et trahir : ambiguïté du dire et de l’être dans trois romans de Marie NDiaye, laid the foundations for the research she intends to pursue at UC Berkeley. Her literary and intellectual interests are centered on the twentieth century and concern representations and theorizations of disrupted...
I am a first-year PhD student in the French Department with a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the Evergreen State College and an M.A. in French from the University of Oregon. My MA thesis was a Fanonian reading of arguments for literary independence from the metropole within Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning novel La Plus secrète mémoire des hommes. At UC Berkeley, I intend to study works of 20th and 21st century francophone literature which straddle the ontological divide between fiction and history, as well as works whose syncretic compositional nature...
I study the transmission of political and cultural forms between Italy and France in the sixteenth century. I am currently writing a dissertation on the reception of republican political thought in Renaissance French literature, in which I argue that French humanists developed their vision of national literary community by aestheticizing republican concepts such as citizenship, liberty, fortune, and the contingency of the state. My PhD work has been supported by the Newberry Library, the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship, Berkeley’s Graduate Division, and the Georges Lurcy...
I'm a fifth-year PhD student in the Romance Languages & Literatures program. I earned my BA in Comparative Literature from Barnard College in 2019 and completed a BA/MA at Columbia University in English & Comparative Literature in 2020, where I did most of my coursework not-so-secretly in the linguistics program.
My research thus far has looked at the emergence of neo-morphemes and neo-pronouns among non-binary French speakers in Montréal, language attitudes and ideologies in the linguistic landscape of Lisbon, Portugal, and treatment of l'écriture inclusive in the...
