French PhD Alumni
Graduates of the French PhD program at Pitt are researching, teaching, publishing, and working at the highest levels of university administration in academic institutions throughout the US and abroad. Of the PhDs who have graduated in the last ten years, close to 90% (14 out of 16) found full-time academic jobs; nearly two-thirds of these jobs were tenure-track positions.
Pitt's PhDs in French teach or have taught full time at such institutions as Ball State U, Barnard College, California State U at Long Beach, Florida Institute of Technology, Gettysburg College, Hood College, Iowa State U, U of Glasgow, U of Missouri-Kansas City, U of New Mexico, and Washington College. For featured alumni profiles, see here.
Gabriella Baika
Assistant Professor, Florida Institute of Technology
E-mail: gbaika@fit.edu
Research interests: Romance languages and literatures (Early modern period).
Dissertation title: "Lingua indisciplinata: A Study of the Sins of the Tongue in the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy.”
Dissertation directors: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Dennis Looney (Italian)
Dolores Buttry
Assistant Professor (German), University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown
E-mail: djb59@pitt.edu
Cary Campbell
Visiting Lecturer; Coordinator, University of Pittsburgh
E-mail: cac25@pitt.edu
Dissertation title: "The Discursive Construction of the Ivorian Nation in the Period of Ivoirité"
Dissertation director: Roberta Hatcher
Didier Course
Professor of French, Hood College
E-mail: dcourse@hood.edu
Melissa Deininger
Assistant Professor, Iowa State University
E-mail: mdein@iastate.edu
Dissertation title: "After the Revolution: Terror, Literature, and the Nation in Modern France"
Dissertation director: Giuseppina Mecchia
Susan Dudash
E-mail: sjdudash@yahoo.com
Dissertation Title: "Giving Voice to the People: Rhetoric, History, and Literary Representations of Social Conflict in the Late Middle Ages"
Dissertation sirector: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
Robert Fagley
Instructor (French), University of Memphis
Dissertation title: "Bachelors, Bastards and Nomadic Masculinity: a study of illegitimacy in Maupassant and Gide"
Teresa Johnson-Evans
Dissertation title: "History, Genre, Politics: The Cinema of Yamina Benguigui"
Dissertation director: Giuseppina Mecchia
Laurence Grove
Reader in French, University of Glasgow
Director, Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures
E-mail: L.Grove@french.arts.gla.ac.uk
Dissertation director: Daniel Russell
Djehane Hassouna
E-mail: dahst27@pitt.edu
Dissertation title: “The Echo of Solitude in the Romantic Representations of the Sea: Multivalence of a Motif in Romance Literatures”
Dissertation directors: Giuseppina Mecchia and Yves Citton
Alison Halasz
Instructor, University of Pittsburgh
E-mail: alisonvort@hotmail.com or alv19@pitt.edu
Web page: www.alisonhalasz.com
Dissertation title: "Henri Michaux, poet-painter"
Dissertation directors: Roberta Hatcher and Daniel Russell
Nacer Khelouz
Assistant Professor of French
University of Missouri-Kansas City, Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures
E-mail: khelouznacer@umkc.edu
Dissertation title: "Le roman algérien de langue française de l’entre-deux guerres à l’épreuve du politique: en lisant Robert Randau et Abdelkader Hadj Hamou"
Dissertation director: Philip Watts
Yahya Laayouni
Assistant Professor of Arabic and French
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
E-mail: ylaayoun@bloomu.edu
Dissertation title:"Redefining Beur Cinema: Constituting Subjectivity through Film"
Dissertation directors: Giuseppina Mecchia and Randall Halle (German)
Aparna Nayak-Guercio
Assistant Professor of French, California State University, Long Beach
E-mail: anayakgu@csulb.edu
Dissertation title: “The project of Liberation and the projection of national identity. Calvo, Aragon, Jouhandeau, 1944-1945”
Dissertation director: Philip Watts
Noemie Parrat
E-mail:
Dissertation title: "Zola’s Woman as Unnatural Animal"
Dissertation Director: Giuseppina Mecchia
Pamela Pears
Associate Professor of French, Washington College
E-mail: ppears2@washcoll.edu
Dissertation title: "Women’s Words: Postcolonial Francophone Literature in Viet Nam and Algeria"
Dissertation Director: Philip Watts
Amy Reinsel
Visiting Lecturer,
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
E-mail: areinsel@iupui.edu
Dissertation title: "Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects in the 19th Century Haiti"
Dissertation Director: Giuseppina Mecchia
Linda Rouillard
Associate Professor, University of Toledo
E-mail: linda.rouillard@utoledo.edu
Mark Sanford
Associate Dean of Graduate & Continuing Studies
Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, Muskingum College
E-mail: msanford@muskingum.edu
James Tarpley
E-mail:
Dissertation title: "The Algerian Island in the Novels of Albert Camus: The End of the Pied-Noir Adventure Tale"
Dissertation director: Philip Watts
Rajeshwari Vallury
Associate Professor of French, The University of New Mexico
E-mail: rvallury@unm.edu
Book title:
University of Toronto Press: “‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire: Literature, Feminism and Myth.”