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”...
Julie is a first-year PhD student originally from Tours located in the Loire Valley, a region celebrated for its wine, cheese, and as the birthplace of Balzac and Rabelais (though she suspects the wine and cheese might be the real highlights). She spent the first 24 years of her life there and earned a B.A. in English, a professional degree in Communication, and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of Tours.
In 2020, undeterred by a global pandemic, Julie embarked on her first transatlantic adventure to join CU Boulder as an exchange student. There, she began her teaching...
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 with a designated emphasis in Film and Media. My research interests lie in representations of post-colonial subjectivities in France (especially of the North African diaspora), through aesthetics of be.longing and attention to spatial paradigms and movement in French and Francophone contemporary narratives across media (literature, cinema, television, new media), with an emphasis on the nascent serialized narratives on streaming platforms.
At the intersection of French and Francophone Studies, Postcolonial...
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 am interested in how literature registers historical change in ways that diverge from the narrative conventions of history writing. I explore this topic in my dissertation by studying the emergence of the printed collection in sixteenth century France. I first chart how antiquarianism, or the collecting of archaeological objects from the classical past, turned into a form of political communication during the Italian Wars and caused the collection to emerge as a dominant mode of literary organization in Renaissance France. Then I recount how the printed collection—of poems, stories,...
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...
Riley Lim is a first-year MA/PhD student in French. He holds a B.A. in French and Francophone Studies and Communication at the University of San Diego. He has a longstanding interest in the nineteenth century and has shared his passion for poetry with various audiences, including members of the French and Francophone Studies Club. Through a Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, Riley combined his interests in French poetics with critical cultural studies on migration, race, and Francophone identity, which led to completing an honors thesis called “L’Esthétique et L’enjeux identitaire...
