French & Italian

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Alumni profile

Holly Tucker, BA'89, is now a tenure-track assistant professor of French at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. She has many fond memories of her experience majoring in French (and political science) at IU. Charlotte Gerrard was the one who convinced her to come to Indiana and major in French during a college visit, while Holly was still a junior in high school. Every time Holly teaches Horace, she thinks of Gerrard, who did a dramatization of Camille's murder in one of her classes that left everyone breathless. Holly has been fascinated by Corneille's theater ever since. In fact, she published an article on Médée in The French Review (1995). Holly also remembers serving as an honors teaching Intern in Michael Berkvam's existentialism course. Berkvam shared with her his love of teaching and students, which inspired Holly to continue graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she received an MA in 1991 and a PhD in 1996 and to become a professor of French.

At Vanderbilt, Holly's teaching responsibilities are double, for she is in charge of French language teaching coordination and 17th-century French literature in her department. She has tackled the methodological complications of teaching foreign literature in immersion in two papers delivered at the Modern Language Association Conference and at the meeting of the American Association of Teachers of French. She teaches at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and her courses include Intermediate French, Introduction to French Literature, and the whole 17th-century French literature and civilization curriculum. She recently designed and taught a freshman seminar on the fairy tale, which involved discussion of oral traditions, tale types, psychoanalytic theory, feminisms, and the trajectory of the genre from its Greco-Roman origins to postmodern manifestations of the marvelous in various media.

Her research interests include the history of the 17th-century French novel and women writers, intellectuals, and social figures of the period. Last year, she contributed two articles on Mme de Rambouillet and Mme de Sablé to A Feminist Companion to French Literature. Her research has focused increasingly on childbirth and fertility as a metaphor for the development of prose fiction across the century. She has been studying most recently many early-modern treatises on embryology and gynecology, as well as other documents on midwives, accoucheurs, and learned and lay understandings of reproduction. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript on the subject, titled Madmen, Cannibals, and Whores: Prose Fiction and the Ideology of Marginalization in Seventeenth-Century France. At the moment, she has two new studies in progress. The first considers infertility in the fairy tale. She is examining the marvelous circumstances of Anne of Austria's own infertility, and the much later birth of Louis Dieudonné, to frame the analysis. The second focuses on the common function of midwives, the superstitions with which they are associated, and elderly fairies in tales of the 1690s.

Holly and her husband, alumnus Jonathan Hamilton (BS'89 Biology), are in the process of restoring an older home in Nashville. They spend their spare time doing all things gardening.

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Last updated: July 16, 1999
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