What will I learn?
The joint Ph.D. Program in French Studies and French allows students to blend rigorous training in literary analysis with a broad, multi-disciplinary exploration of French and Francophone worlds from the French Revolution to the present. Housed at both the Institute of French Studies and the department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture, students chart their own course between both units, exploring ideas and methods while devising specific research projects with a wide array of faculty and graduate students. These opportunities - as well as a slate of courses and events conducted in both English and French - make our program truly unique in the field. The joint program prepares students to teach both literature and history or the social sciences in French departments, and gives them the scholarly expertise to integrate the two. From year 1, students attend advanced seminars in literary criticism, conduct original research, and take courses in other disciplines of their choice, including cinema, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and gender studies. Working closely with advisors at the IFS and the French department, they explore new ideas while working toward a dissertation prospectus (to which they turn in earnest in year 3). In the French department, students take courses with faculty whose domains of expertise include queer and feminist theory, history of the body and emotions, environmental humanities, political and critical theory, theory of the novel, history in fiction, and cinema. At the IFS, they delve deep into French and Francophone history and social sciences while working with faculty whose research revolves around the Caribbean and post-colonial circulations, migration, the politics of place and memory, ethnography, race and identity in France, the Maghreb, West Africa, family history, and new modes of historical writing.
