Alumni and Placement

Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois. Melek’s work focuses on the singing voices of Kabyle women in film, audio recordings, and literature. She is author of Listening to Taos Amrouche, a Kabyle Woman’s Singing Voice in a Context of Exile and Immigration: Between a Search for Intimacy and Independence published in the Journal of Amazigh Studies in 2026. Her dissertation title: “Singing Matters: Women’s Voices as Survival in Colonial and Postcolonial Tamazgha.” (PhD 2026, Advisor: Olivia Harrison)

Visiting Assistant Professor, Occidental College. Jesse’s research focuses on connections between metaphors of consumption and representations of men and masculinity in Senegalese literature, film, and poetry. Dissertation title: “Tasty, Comestible Men: Metabolic Poetics in Senegal” (PhD 2023, advisor: Lydie Moudileno)

Alvin’s research focuses on Québecois and Franco-American cultural productions and representations of migration and labor. Dissertation title: “Colonial Ventures: The Poetics of Migration, Colonization, and Labor in Francophone North America” (PhD 2023, advisor: Lydie Moudileno)

Grants Manager, Los Angeles LGBT Center. Brieuc is author of the article “Sous les pavés, l’hiver: Hocquenghem, transparence, et politiques queers radicales dans le sillage de Mai 68” in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 23.2 (2019). He co-edited and wrote the preface to To Think Is to Say No by Jacques Derrida. Dissertation title: “X-human: Radical Queer Politics in the wake of May ’68 France” (PhD 2023, advisor: Panivong Norindr)

Dornsife Fellow in General Education, USC. Her article “Reconnecting Sight and Site: Reterritorialization in Chantal Spitz’s Cartes postales” appears in the April 2023 issue of the Australian Journal of French Studies. Dissertation title: “Beyond the Sea that Separates: Francophone Voices of Oceania” (PhD 2023, advisor: Olivia C. Harrison)

Richard’s work considers how filmmakers and thinkers have explored and experimented with dynamics of the everyday in post/colonial France. He is author of “The Archivist of Protest: The Attention Economy and Chris Marker’s Use of Détournement in Chats perchés” in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 27.3 (2023). Dissertation title: “Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See: French Filmmakers and Writers and Everyday Life in Postwar Social Space.” (PhD 2022, advisor: Panivong Norindr)

French Instructor, World Literatures, Flintridge Sacred Heart, just outside Los Angeles, CA. Kristen’s dissertation research focuses on the legal history of nationality from post-1945 to the present in relation to France’s former colonies. Dissertation title: “Identity Trouble: National Bodies and French Hospitality.” (PhD 2021, advisor: Panivong Norindr)

English Teacher, Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, just outside Los Angeles, CA. Ingrid’s dissertation research focuses on national identity in relation to aristocratic decadence and French colonial history. Dissertation title: “L’autre chez nous: Defining the National Body in French Literature, 1800-1848.” (PhD 2017, advisor: Natania Meeker)

Freelance cultural and educational consultant in Portland, OR. Katy’s dissertation research explores how French literature, from the Revolution to the 1980s, engages in a critique of capital punishment. Dissertation title: “Law and Disorder: Literary Case Studies of the Great Criminal in the Shadow of the Guillotine.” (PhD 2015, advisor: Peggy Kamuf)

Professor of French, Pasadena City College. She has several published articles, including “Les hystériques par elles-mêmes : à la recherche des mots de la Salpêtrière” appearing in Corps in 2020. Dissertation title: “Hysteria in Lourdes and Miracles at the Salpêtrière: The Intersection of Faith and Medical Discourse in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature.” (PhD 2016, advisor: Natania Meeker)

World Language Department Chair, The Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles, CA. Laurence is the author of “Marronnage au féminin dans Rosalie l’Infâme d’Evelyne Trouillot” which appeared in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies in 2012. Dissertation title: “Révoltes sans témoin: la tracée du marronnage dans la littérature haïtienne.” (PhD 2015, advisor: Panivong Norindr)

Associate Professor of French, Department of French, The Ohio State University. Author of Danses et pandémies. Du sida à la covid-19 (Varia Québec, 2023), and co-editor of Embodied Narratives in the Health Humanities and Literary Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2025). Dissertation title: “Danser la maladie, contaminer la beauté: a viral approach to the (choreo)graphed body.” (PhD 2014, advisor: Natania Meeker)

Freelance film producer in Belgium. Olivier is author of “L’autographie mareysienne: ou comment séparer les corps pour les rapprocher d’eux-mêmes” published in Paroles gelées. Dissertation title: “La galvanisation du corps: le cinéma français et la biopolitique.” (PhD 2013, advisor Akira Mizuta Lippit)

Director of Brighton Rocks International Film Festival. His articles include “Cinema as Translucent Reality: The Actuality Aesthetic in the French New Wave” published in Post-scriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies Dissertation. Dissertation title: “Deadly deviations, subversive cinema: the influence of Hollywood film noir on the French new wave.” (PhD 2012, advisor: Karen Pinkus)

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Tulane University. Author of The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First-Century France (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Her published articles include: “Disjunctures and diaspora in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss” appearing in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and “Documenting the undocumented: Valeria Luiselli’s Refugee Children Archives” published in Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture in 2020. (PhD 2011, advisor: Panivong Norindr)

Academic Curator at Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. Dissertation title: “Primal Perception: The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century France.” (PhD 2010, advisor: Antónia Szabari)