2025-01-18 -   Congratulations to our Italian Basic Language Program that has been awarded a grant by the Italian Ministry of Culture for the second year in a row. Administered by the Italian Cultural Services in the United States, the grant will support our program's course offerings of eight-week online summer courses in Italian 101 and 102 (Elementary Italian I and II) in 2025. These courses...

2024-12-27 - Congratulations to Professor Aurore Mroz who was awarded one of the Villa Albertine's (French Institute for Culture and Education) prestigious French in Higher Education grants for 2025-2027 grant cycle. Professor Aurore Mroz'...

2024-12-22 - After a successful Fall 2024 semester teaching about the Italian capital, Rome (ITAL 156), and Italian Culture in a European and global context, including the mafia (ITAL 406) Professor Ciro Incoronato is gearing up to teach the Italian program's minority general education course ITAL 250 'Minority Identities in Film and Culture: The Italian American and African American Experience'.  A...

2024-12-22 - Professor Aurore Mroz and two PhD students, Macha Petre and Scarlet Peterson, presented an innovative public engagement project, Le Cercle Francophone (The Francophone Circle), at the Chancellor's Inaugural Public Engagement Summit at UIUC on December 13. Their...

2024-12-22 - FRIT office manager Anne Olmstead and office support specialist Linh Tran were recognized with a small gift by faculty and graduate students at this year's FRIT Holiday Luncheon on Wednesday, December 11 from 11 to 2 pm. Each year, the buffet-style Luncheon opens at 11 am and runs continuously until 2 pm, and it is open to faculty, students to sit and chat or just grab a sandwich or fruit to...

2024-12-22 - Heartfelt congratulations to Professors Julie Gaillard, Daniel Maroun, and Felisa Reynolds who received an LAS COVID-19 Revitalization Fellowship that will allow them to focus more on their ongoing research in the academic year 2025-26. Their fellowships come with a course release and, in some cases, a small amount of research support. Bravo...

2024-12-20 - The Villa Albertine's Choix Goncourt, or Goncourt Prize Selection, gives undergraduate students in French from campuses across the United States the opportunity to participate in the selection process of the best French novel of the year. The Prix Goncourt, or Goncourt Prize, is one...

2024-08-16 - We are delighted to welcome Assistant Professor Ciro Incoronato (PhD 2024, Duke University) who is new graduate faculty in Italian Studies. He comes to us with extensive teaching and service experience and is an expert on Mediterranean and transnational Italian literatures, cultures, and cinema, with focus on environmental issues affecting subaltern communities in the Italian diaspora. He...

2024-03-03 - On March 8 2024, Professor François Proulx is organizing an international conference on Marcel Proust at the École normale supérieure in Paris, as part of FRIT's ongoing scholarly collaboration with ITEM, the Institute for Modern Texts and Manuscripts (ENS/CNRS, Paris). Proust experts from France, Japan, and the United States...

2023-12-13 - Professor Armine Kotin Mortimer, Professor Emerita of French Literature in FRIT, has published the translation of Julia Kristeva’s “Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death or Language Haunted by Sex” at Columbia University Press. Professor Mortimer, recipient of the 2020 NEA Translation Fellowship, translates literary fiction and nonfiction from French, with a particular focus on contemporary authors...

2023-12-09 - Join us in congratulating Amanda Smith who successfully defended her PhD dissertation on Friday, December 1. Her dissertation opened a new, and hopefully lasting, focus of our program on Black collectivism and French Black women individuality. Titled “21st Century Black Beauty Resistance: Collectivism, Individuality and In/visibility in Black French Women's Body and Hair Representations,” the...

2023-11-12 - Prior to the pandemic, the French program had organized more than one visit of our French classrooms from local high schools in he area. However, our first visit, post-pandemic, with 26 high schoolers from Mount Zion, IL on Wednesday, October 11 was special in many ways. First of all, the sheer number of participants who wished to visit beginner and advanced French classes was impressive and...

2023-11-12 - This past October was busy with two Ph.D. dissertation defenses directed by Professor Emeritus, Jean-Philippe Mathy. Elham Karimi Balan, now at Colby College, Maine, defended her dissertation, titled "Writing the Self in the Language of the Other: Trauma and the Body in Autobiographical Novels by Female Iranian Exiles in France" on Wednesday, October 11 in person. Two weeks later, we had the...

2023-10-28 - Professor Vincent Hunter Capps from the University of Buffalo gave an inspiring lecture on Thursday, October 26, titled "Raw is Law: Queer Theory and the Dustanien Text." The lecture was addressed to the public, but students currently enrolled in Professor Daniel Maroun's FR 543 graduate seminar on 'Narratives of disease: HIV/AIDS in French literature and cinema' had the opportunity to...

2023-10-10 - What are small but meaningful changes that you can apply to improve your classroom teaching? How do you improve courses in an entire program while balancing other professional responsibilities? These were some of the overarching questions Assistant Teaching Professor Amy Clay asked in her CITL lunch-time lecture on Thursday, October 5. Her virtual lecture was part of...