French & Italian

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Student update

Graduate student news

June Bertrand (MA'92, ABD French literature) returned to Bloomington in summer 1997 after three years in Seattle. She served as president of the FRIT Graduate Student Organization in 1997­98 and found it to be a rewarding way of reconnecting with familiar faces and getting to know some of the new students and faculty members in the department. She served on the graduate student committee in charge of organizing one day of the third annual IU Preparing Future Faculty Conference on Feb. 26-27, 1997. June helped organize the two sessions devoted to mentoring: "Making the Most of Your Mentor" and "How to Be a Good Mentor." She also got back in the classroom after a hiatus of two years, teaching two sections of F250 in spring '98. During the fall '98 semester, June did an internship in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Butler University in Indianapolis. She taught a third-year French course titled Littérature et civilisation françaises du moyen âge au dix-septième siècle. She was encouraged to cover not only literature, but also the other arts of these periods, from architecture to music, painting, and sculpture. She employed a variety of media in the course, from films and slides to the Internet. An added bonus to doing this internship was that it gave her an opportunity to work with Assistant Professor Sylvie Vanbaelen, PhD'97, who is doing very well in her second year of a tenure-track position at Butler. Now that the internship is finished, June is devoting herself full-time to finishing her dissertation on the anonymous 16th-century French collection of short stories, Les Comptes du monde adventureux. She intends to finish before the end of the millennium!

Kris Coburn (MA'96, ABD French linguistics) traveled to France recently to deliver the presentation "Cross-cultural (Mis)communication of Emblems: A Study of French and American Students' Understanding of Emblems" at a conference on "Speech and Gesture in Multi-Modal Communication and Interaction" on Dec. 9-11, 1998.

Laura Dennis-Bay (MA'95, ABD French literature) was married in May to Mark Bay, who is a student in the IU School of Library and Information Science. Congratulations to them both! She will be at the IU East campus in Richmond next school year on a Preparing Future Faculty Fellowship. She will be in charge of teaching first-year Spanish and second-year French language. Laura just attended two conferences this spring at the universities of Cincinnati and Kentucky, where she presented papers on the poets François Maynard and Mathurin Régnier, respectively. Laura's conference presentations represent sections of her dissertation concerning the figure of the old woman in early 17th-century French texts.

Erin K. Gibson (completing first year MA work in French linguistics) published two translations Suzanne Cesaire's "1943: Surrealism and Us" and Ikbal El Alailly's "Introduction to Vertu de l'Allemagne" last fall in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). She is thrilled to have been a part of such groundbreaking work in women's studies and the surrealist movement. She is planning to spend a month in francophone Canada this summer, with hopes of working on a service project akin to Habitat for Humanity.

In Jacques Merceron's F505 seminar, Middle French Literature, Kelly Hand (PhD candidate, English) wrote a paper titled "Jean Michel's Apocalyptic Magdalen," which has been accepted for publication in the journal Fifteenth-Century Studies.

Alison Leininger (MA'96, doctoral student in French linguistics) has become involved in teaching for the IU Honors Program in Brest and has greatly enjoyed the experience. She is heading back for more this summer. More personally, she recently gained a sister-in-law and expects to be an aunt, for the first time, in March.

Heather McCullough (MA'96, ABD French literature) and Daria Roche (MA'95, ABD French literature) are part of a committee preparing an exhibition at the Lilly Library to take place during the conference Women Seeking Expression, France 1789-1914, in September. This conference is being organized by professors Rosemary Lloyd and Margot Gray.

Kathleen O'Connor (MA'97 French literature, MA'98 French linguistics) presents a paper in May in Montreal at the International Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics Association. Her talk is titled "When Is a Cluster Not a Cluster?"

Ted Seaman (MA'94, ABD French literature) was the recipient of a 1999 fellowship from Indy Pride Inc. This organization works to further awareness and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people in society in general. He received the award to fund his attendance at the Cincinnati Romance Languages and Literatures Conference in May, where he is giving a paper on the movement to the closet in Queneau's Zazie dans le métro. He accepted the award on March 15 at the Diversity Center in Indianapolis.

Jody Shiffman (MA'91, ABD Italian) worked as associate editor with Julia and Peter Bondanella on the second edition of their Dictionary of Italian Literature.

Rachel Thyre (MA'97, PhD candidate in French linguistics) presented a paper in November 1998 at the Boston University Conference on Language Development. It was titled "The Primacy of Syntax and Second Language Acquisition: The Interpretation of 'combien de' Extractions in English-French interlanguage," and was co-authored by professors Laurent Dekydtspotter (French linguistics), Rex Sprouse (German), Kimberly Swanson (MA'98, PhD candidate in French linguistics), and Thyre herself. She is also serving as the editorial assistant to Professor Valdman for the journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Next year, she will be promoted to the position of assistant to the editor and will train the future editorial assistant, Kimberly Swanson. Rachel encourages her peers in French linguistics to apply for these positions in the future, because they offer an excellent opportunity to learn about how a journal is published, to find out what editors are looking for in an article, and to meet important linguists.

Jolene Vos-Camy (MA'94, ABD French literature) is a lecturer at Calvin College, her alma mater in Grand Rapids, Mich. She enjoys teaching French culture and civilization through a multi-media approach. She has taught several times a francophone literature course involving readings from Guinée, Cameroun, Senegal, Morocco, Guadeloupe, and Quebec. Last year, she served as a respondent in a session at the Convention of the Society for Interdisciplinary French 17th-Century Studies, and this year she is presenting a section of her dissertation titled "Ragotin's Peril, or Comic Violence in the Roman comique" at the University of Kentucky Foreign Language Conference. She and Pierre Camy (MA'98) were married in the United States on Jan. 30, 1998, and had a church wedding in Beost, Pyrénées Atlantiques, on June 6, 1998. Let's send them our congratulations!

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Last updated: July 16, 1999
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