Graduate Students
FRENCH PHD
Karen Adams
Karen received a BA in French and History from Vassar College in 2003, where she wrote her senior thesis in History on the beguines, a medieval women’s religious order. In the fall of 2009 she will be starting her second year of the PhD with MA en route at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include Catholicism in French history and literature, in particular women and spirituality in the Middle Ages, and saints’ lives.
Eleonore Bertrand
Eléonore received her M.A. in English and American Literature and Civilization from the Université Paris-X, Nanterre, where she wrote her thesis on two first First Ladies and their pioneering role in the shaping of the American nation. She nurtures a deep interest in the transitional nation rebuilding itself from the shipwreck of past events. She is currently a third-year Ph.D. student in the French Department where she now studies the shipwreck of the French ancien régime. Her primary research interests include the notion of exile in 19th-century France, particularly the sentiment of étrangeté. Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël embody a generation of men and women that is lost in the present and who paradoxically find themselves constrained to live a life in abeyance. This illusion of the present, whether it is physical or poetic, always takes the shape of a fuite. (Wherein the self is being voluntarily or involuntarily imposed to evade.) These forms of evasion are imbued with an entanglement between the nostalgia of the past and the present which render their writing melancholic. Her secondary research interest is in the oulipian creative / recreative act of writing.
Cary Campbell
cac25@pitt.edu or ckc@email.byu.edu
Cary double-majored at Brigham Young University to obtain a BA in French and in Linguistics. He pursued both interests at the University of Pittsburgh where he earned an MA in French Linguistics and Literatures with exams in language pedagogy, syntax, and the Romantic period. Having learned his French in Africa, Cary is now finishing up a dissertation on nationalism in novels from the Côte d’Ivoire, applying the tools of pragmatics to close readings of literature.
Working Dissertation Title: The Discursive Construction of the Côte d’Ivoire in Novels from the Period of Ivoirité.
Mert Ertunga
Mert received his B.A. in French from the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) in '07. He previously received his B.S. in Finance ('89-UAB) and his M.B.A. ('93-UAB). His interests include the 18th Century Literature - The Enlightenment and the Francophone-Swiss literature. Mert Ertunga was born in Istanbul, and has a daughter, Erin.
Andrea Jonsson
Andrea Jonsson is a Montana native currently working towards a PhD in French Literature. She received the DALF (Diplôme Approfondi de la LangueFrançaise) from the Université d’Aix-Marseille I in 2003, and her Bachelor’s Degree in Music from McGill University in 2004. She then lived in Paris teaching English, consulting, and translating in advertising agencies for three years while working towards an M.A. in English Literature at the Open University. Her research interests include pedagogy, musicology, and socio-linguistics as well as questions of space, architecture, topography, and cartography in literary discourse.
Erin King
Yahya Laayouni
Jennifer Lawrence
Maeva Mateos
Zachary Moir
Zach received a BA in Philosophy and French Literature from Taylor University in 2003. He then completed an MA in Philosophy from Ohio University in 2005, writing a thesis focusing on functional analysis and its use in understanding Freudian psychoanalysis. He is currently a PhD student in the French & Italian Department where he studies questions of existential epistemology – specifically the epistemology of Sartre, Beckett and Merleau-Ponty.
Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier
Charles-Louis is a native of France and received his MA in English literature and Civilization from the University of Tours, France, and his MA in French literature from the University of Pittsburgh. He's currently a 3rd year PhD student in French Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary research focuses on medieval and early Renaissance anti-clerical poetry, leading to the Reformation. His secondary research interests are medieval and early modern demonology, the history of the Catholic dogma in the Middle Ages and the figure of God in Arthurian legends.
Katie Moriarty
Katie double-majored in International Studies/Political Science and French at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (BA 04). As a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, she received a DEA in Etudes europeennes (politique, economique et societe) from the Institut europeen de l'Universite de Geneve. In the Fall of 2007, she began the PhD program in French Literature and Politics. Katie is particularly interested in the French nation of the late 20th and 21st centuries. For her dissertation, she hopes to explore the effects of the European Union on the French nation in literature during these times periods.
Normand Raymond
Amy Romanowski
Amy is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of French and Italian. A Wyoming native, she received an M.A. in French from the University of Utah in 2005, and taught high school French in Phoenix, AZ before coming to Pittsburgh. Amy's research interests lie in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory, not only as they appear in francophone circles of literature and culture, but in any social or cultural medium that destabilizes gender or sex. Though still tapering down potential avenues of focus for her dissertation, Amy anticipates concentrating on Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'enfant de sable and its approach to the presence of masculinity in the non-white, non-male body. For the 2009-2010 school year, Amy's instructional interests will take her across campus to the Department of Women's Studies, where she was selected to receive a teaching fellowship and is currently teaching Introduction to Women's Studies. In her next life, Amy intends to return as either a make-up artist or as a princess.
David Spieser-Landes (A&S Fellow)
David Spieser-Landes is another
one of these language enthusiasts, which likely has something to do in the first place with the trilingual setting of the Alsace region where he grew up speaking French, Elsässerditsch (Alsatian) and Hochdeutsch (German).
As part of his doctoral research here at Pitt (PhD in French with a Track in Politics, M.A en route), David Spieser-Landes is planning to work on the preservation of minority languages, and especially on the intersection between Literature and Language Policy regarding his native Alsatian dialect. The two authors he will study in his dissertation are Robert Grossmann, former Mayor of Strasbourg, capital of the European Union, and André Weckmann, “spokesperson” of the Cercle René Schickelé, who represent two quite distinct views on how the dialect could/can/should be saved, entailing also sharp viewpoint differences on the very nature and role of the European Union.
Before coming to Pittsburgh, David Spieser-Landes earned a French Master’s Degree in American Civilization from Université Lyon 2, France; the title of his paper read “The Amish Conception of Citizenship –a Challenge for the American Democracy.” He then held a Teaching Assistantship at Penn State University, and taught French for two years at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA.
Marina Starik
Marina holds an M.A. in French from the University of Utah, 2005. She is currently in her second year of the doctoral program in French at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include semiology, thematics and aesthetics of clothing, fashion history, dandyism, gender, and sexuality in 19th and 20th century French literature, visual art, film and popular culture.
Justin Swettlen
Justin received a BA in French and Spanish at the University of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania in 2005 before moving on to complete an MA in French Language and Litterature at the University of Pittsbugh in 2007. He is currently working towards a PhD in French Language and Literature and is interested in questions of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
FRENCH MA
Jerry Cartwright
Jerry graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in French. He also attended courses at the Université de Nancy II in Nancy, France where he took up studies in French literature and culture. He completed an internship teaching English in Lunéville, France during his time abroad. His current academic interests include Beur culture, French history and politics with emphasis on both the modern and age of enlightenment periods.
Timothy Deer
Timothy received his B.S. in Psychology and French with a German Studies minor and a Western European Studies Certificate from the University of Pittsburgh in August of 2007. He is currently teaching English as a lecteur at Université François Rabelais Tours in Tours, France. He will return to the University of Pittsburgh in the autumn of 2009 to complete his Master's in French Literature.
Jesse Studer
An Ohio native, Jesse completed his undergraduate studies at The College of Wooster in 2003 where he received a B.A in Cultural Area Studies with a concentration in the philosophy of modern western Europe. There he wrote theses exploring human commodification from pragmatic, deontological and utilitarian perspectives and then he explored the tensions between different conceptions of love within the works of Søran Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Kant. While at Wooster, he also studied international political theory in Strasbourg, France. He then served as an assistant de langue in the south of France from
2003-2004. Jesse is in the second year of the French M.A program.
His research interests include cultural studies, pedagogy, second language acquisition and questions of agency and autonomy in 19th and 20th century literature.
ITALIAN MA
Scott Bishop
Scott Bishop is a first-year student in the Italian Master’s program. He earned his BA in History of Art, Dramatic Art, and Italian Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to arriving in Pittsburgh he lived for several years in Bologna, Italy, where he was professor’s assistant in Communication Sciences at the Università degli Studi di Bologna. His research interests include problems of modernity and national consciousness, 20th century Italian avant-garde and fascism, and issues in contemporary narrative.
Renny Maria Hess
Renny is in her first year of the Italian Language and Literature Master’s degree program. In 2008, she received her Bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Italian from Duquesne University. During her undergraduate career, she studied at the Centro Linguistico Italiano Dante Alighieri in Rome, Italy, the American University of Rome in Rome, Italy, and the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests vary from the writings of San Francesco d’Assisi to Italian fascist culture and issues in Italian colonialism.
Wayne Leavitt
Wayne has recently joined the University of Pittsburgh's French and Italian department after receiving his BA in Italian Language and Literature from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His main research interests involve second language acquisition, dialectology, socio-linguistics, cultural identity, and immigration, but he also holds a special place in his heart for neorealism and its effects in literature and cinema.
Ettore Marchetti