Current Thesis Projects
Sacha Craig: "Silent Discourse: Ambivalence, Resistance, and the Politics of Silence in Jacques Roumain, Mariama Bâ, and Maryse Condé” (Director of Research: Felisa Vergara Reynolds)
Daniel Folger: "The New Women from Nowhere: Comprendre « l’antiféminisme » de Rachilde, Georges de Peyrebrune et les auteures de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle" (Director of research: François Proulx)
Jesse Marie Keruskin: "Cosmologies of the Body: Ecology, the Entangled Human and Life beyond Earth in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century French Literature " (Director of research: Marcus Keller)
Jude Mensah: "Lost in Translation or Learning through It? Evidence from a Mixed Methods Study on French and World Languages Learners' Guided and Unguided Use of Machine Translation" (Director of research: Aurore Mroz)
Scarlet Peterson: "No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Kids Go to College: How do Heritage Speakers of Spanish (HSS) mediate linguistic (in)security and academic performance through their acquisition of French?" (Director of research: Aurore Mroz)
Macha Petre: "Impact of AI-based Roleplay on L2 Oral French Development" (Director of research: Aurore Mroz)
Jessica Wikle: "Intercolonial Intimacies: Temporality, Affect, and Sexuality in Late-20th and 21st Century Maghrebi Women's Literature" (Director of research: Daniel Maroun)
Salim Zghal: "The Invention of the Honnête Ottoman in French Neoclassical Tragedy," (Director of research: Marcus Keller)
Ph.D. Theses Defended since 2016
Robin Turner: "Stigmatized Trailblazers to Celebrated Deviants: Discourses of (Homo)sexuality in the Montréal Press after the Québec Quiet Revolution, 1969-1977" (Directors of research: Michele Koven (Communication & FRIT) and Jean-Philippe Warren (Concordia University)). 2026.
Williams Frimpong Asamoah: “Social ties in language use, maintenance, and shift among the Congolese in Urbana-Champaign: A Sociolinguistic Study,” (Director of research: Zsuzsanna Fagyal). 2026
Julia Gorham: “L2 French Students’ and Instructors’ Experiences of Critical Literacies Pedagogy: A Mixed Methods Program Evaluation.” (Director of research: Aurore Mroz). 2025
Julien Berthelon: "Descendants of Charles Bovary: Male Anxieties Through the Figure of the Cheated Husband in French Fin-de-Siècle Novels and Silent Films." (Director of research: François Proulx). 2024
Lisa Brittingham: "The Relationship between a Musical Background and French Pronunciation for Novice Adult Learners: A Mixed Methods Study" (Director of research: Aurore Mroz). 2024
Amanda Smith: "21st Century Black Beauty Resistance: Collectivism, Individualism and In/visibility in Black French Women's Body and Hair Representations” (Director of research: Felisa Vergara Reynolds). 2023
Nicolas Portugal: "Entre discours et fictions : Penser et écrire l’événement du «11 septembre 2001» en France" (Director of research: Jean-Philippe Mathy). 2023.
Elham Karimi Balan: "Writing the Self in the Language of the Other: Trauma and the Body in Autobiographical Novels by Female Iranian Exiles in France" (Director of research: Jean-Philippe Mathy). 2023.
Anne Mutidjo: "Madness in Late 20th and 21st-Century Francophone Women’s Writing of the Caribbean" (Director of research: Felisa Vergara Reynolds). 2022.
Charlotte Prieu: "Language Practices of a Digital Black Feminist Community on French Twitter: Gender, Race, and Identity" (Directors of research: Zsuzsanna Fagyal (French and Italian) and Krystal A. Smalls (Linguistics and Anthropology)). 2022
Tricia Thrasher: "Social Virtual Reality’s Impact on Language Anxiety in Oral Production of L2 French Learners" (Director of research: Aurore Mroz). 2022
Camille Méritan: "The Impact of Self-Reflection and Integrated Pronunciation Instruction on the Intelligibility of Generation Z Learners of French: A Mixed Methods Study" (Director of research: Aurore Mroz). 2020
Peter Tarjanyi: "Sexpeditions: Mapping Mobility and Sexuality in Postcolonial France and the Maghreb" (Director of research: Nancy Blake). 2020
Gyula Zsombok: "Dynamics of Prescriptivism and Lexical Borrowings in Contemporary France" (Co-Directors of research: Joseph Roy [SLCL] and Zsuzsanna Fagyal). 2020
Nicholas Strole: "Reinforcing and Destabilizing Myths of Origin: Storytelling and Biopolitical Communities in Contemporary Theater in French" (Director of research: Marcus Keller). 2019
Malyoune Benoit: "L’écriture impliquée chez Fatou Diome, Léonora Milano et Marie NDiaye" (Director of research: Felisa Vergara Reynolds). 2018
Alice Brown: "Les histoires françaises d'avarice jusqu'aux temps modernes" (Director of research: Emanuel Rota). 2018
Bénédicte Harmon: "'Comme ça, tu ne recommenceras plus' : Représentations et perceptions de l'avortement, entre témoignages et militantisme, 1940-2015" (Co-Directors of research: François Proulx and Stephanie Hilger [Germanic Languages and Literatures]). 2018
Henrietta Boudros: "Bilingualism and Cognition: Exploring the Bilingual Cognitive Advantage Across the Lifespan" (Director of research: Peter Golato). 2017
Priscilla Charrat: "Documents et cheminements: Tracing the Postmemory of the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence" (Director of research: Jean-Philippe Mathy). 2017
Jessica Nicholas: "Social and learner-specific factors in the acquisition of local dialectal features by study abroad students of French" (Co-Directors of research: Aurore Mroz and Zsuzsanna Fagyal). 2017
Gloria Kwok: "Reversing the French Gaze: Four Francophone Vietnamese Women Writers from 1910s to 2000s" (Co-Director of research: Nancy Blake and Jack Yaeger [Louisiana State University]). 2016
Johnny A. Laforet: "Language Maintenance by Haitian Immigrants in the USA: A Case Study of the Chicago Community" (Director of research: Eyamba Bokamba [Linguistics & SLATE]). 2016