Graduate Student

Rachel Pearl O'Shea

Doctoral candidate

Danny Pham

Graduate Student

Jesús Ramírez Silva

Graduate Student

Arianna Robertson

Graduate Student

Lina Scally

Graduate Student

Lina Scally is currently a PhD student in the French Department at UC Berkeley. She recently earned an M.A. in French and Francophone Literature from Miami University (Ohio), following a bachelor's and master's degree in Operations Management (2013-2018) from the IESEG School of Management in Lille, France. During this time, she also studied abroad at Cornell University and the University of Queensland. Lina possesses extensive professional experience in the hospitality industry in Europe, the United States, and Australia. Additionally, she taught French to undergraduate students...

Robbie Spratt

Graduate Student

Welcome! My name is Robbie (they/them) and I’m a first-year PhD student in Berkeley's French Department, interested in contemporary self-writing and autofiction.

Before Berkeley, I earned my B.A. in anthropology and French and francophone studies from Haverford College in 2021. Submitting theses to both departments, I undertook a queer ethnography of astrology, tarot, and healing crystals among college students and a study of silence in French HIV+ self-writing (Jean-Luc Lagarce’s Juste la fin du monde and Guillaume Dustan’s Dans ma chambre). After Haverford, I...

Alexis Stanley

Doctoral Candidate

I am a PhD candidate in the French Department with Designated Emphases in both New Media and Renaissance & Early Modern Studies. My doctoral research engages with French Enlightenment discourse through the triple lens of literary studies, new media studies, and performance studies. I investigate the influence the “Age of Reason” exerted on the development of theatrical techniques and literary accounts of bodily expression and gesture in France, with particular attention to the work of Denis Diderot and the practices of dance, pantomime, and theater.

I graduated in 2015 from Duke...

Amber Patrice Sweat

Doctoral Candidate

Sign up for office hours here! (Spring 25) Tuesday 4-5; Thursday 3-4. Students who would like 30 minutes are welcome to take two slots.

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I’m in the final year of the PhD with a designated emphasis in Film and Media and certificates in Global Urban Humanities; Teaching, Learning, and Higher Education; Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I am also an adjunct faculty member at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

As an educator and researcher, I question what it means to...

Finn Turner

Graduate Student

I am in my fourth year of the French PhD program, having been swept here by a teenage love affair with one Marcel Proust. I am currently exploring the history social anxiety in Francophone prose narrative from the early modern period to the present.

I grew up in a trailer, earned my BA in French with a minor in English at Portland State University, and now live in San Francisco with my partner.

Oliver Whitmore

Doctoral Candidate

Oliver's primary research interest concerns sound change within and across morphological boundaries in Western Romance. He is influenced by cognitive models and interpretations, such as exemplar modeling and phonetic analogy. He is quite interested in Occitan language, culture, and society, focusing on issues such as: inheritance, retention and creation of cultural knowledge, recognition of linguistic knowledge, globalization and identity, and language use in daily life, cultural products, and the media. He has advised the University Libraries in obtaining contemporary Occitan materials....