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 third-year Ph.D. candidate in the French Ph.D. program with a designated emphasis in Film and Media. My research interests lie in French and Francophone contemporary cultures and media (film, documentaries, television, music). I currently focus on the cultural representations of education and the school space in French literature and cinema, and the complicated relationship this republican institution has with children of immigrants in its mission of dissemination of a certain French identity. For my dissertation, I intend to hone in on the television medium and address similar...
Doctoral Candidate and Graduate Student Instructor
I am currently in my sixth year of the Romance Languages and Literatures Ph.D. (concentrations in French, Spanish, and Portuguese). My primary research interests are in carceral studies — specifically multilingualism in prison and prison writing and performance as abolitionist practices. I’m also interested in imaginations of urban space across the Romance-speaking world.
I received a BA in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan in 2018, having studied as well at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
My dissertation reassesses the origins of history as a discipline in the sixteenth century by demonstrating how literary authors developed alternative models of historical change that informed the creation of new literary genres such as the poetic collection and the novel. Scholars have shown that the modern discipline of history emerged out of new approaches to legal interpretation in the French Renaissance. This revolution in legal scholarship occurred due to the spread of humanism, a pan-European intellectual movement that insisted upon a return to the study of classical rhetoric,...
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...
