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'.
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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...
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...
2023-09-30 - Professor Felisa Reynolds, one of our specialists in Francophone literatures and cultures, presented a lecture on Thursday, September 28 in the Department of Anthropology's Colloquium Series on her ongoing research on the representation of colonialism in multiple media, including mainstream movie productions. Drawing on material she published this year in the journal...
2023-09-17 - We are hiring faculty for a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Italian Studies, with a start date of August 16, 2024 and a broad set of specializations! They include but are not limited to: Minority Studies, Cultural Studies, Diaspora and Migration Studies, Gender Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Global Early Modern Studies. Applicants with...
2023-09-17 - This year's incoming graduate students again come to us from a variety of places to study French and Italian literatures, cultures, linguistics, and language pedagogy. From left to right and top to bottom on this picture, meet: Michele Prudence Djemwel Biscene (md58@illinois.edu), M.A. Student in French Studies (B.A....