Eileen McEwan Professor, French |
Education
Teaching Interests
I teach all levels of French language, as well as courses on contemporary French culture and identity, Quebec and Franco-American New England, Francophone cultures of West Africa and the Caribbean, and professional applications of French.
I also co-teach a course on Senegal with a colleague in Film Studies, where students learn about the history and culture of Senegal, focusing in particular on the historical development of cinema and media. We then travel to Senegal for 2 weeks at the end of the semester to visit cultural and historical sites and to collaborate on a music video with a politically engaged hip-hop movement known as Y'en a marre (Fed Up).
I have served as faculty director for our study abroad program in Aix-en-Provence in 2016 and 2019, teaching a course on migration to students while they take their other courses at the American College of the Mediterranean.
Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests
I specialize in Francophone cultures of North America and Second Language Acquisition. My other area of expertise is in African and Caribbean cultures, focusing primarily on writers from Senegal and Haiti who have migrated to France and Canada.
I have published articles on the connections between women's writing in 17th-century France and contemporary Francophone cultures, cultural acquisition strategies for teaching Francophone literature, the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning, and Francophone African literature. I am currently working on a book manuscript that critically examines the place of migrant literature in Quebec and Franco-American literature within Francophone Studies (forthcoming with McGill-Queen's University Press). This book, titled Into and Out of Quebec: Reimagining Quebecois Migrant Literature, explores the migrations of French Canadians to New England in the early twentieth century and the role that the French language played in both the downfall and the recent revival of Franco-American culture.