Graduate Alumni
Our Graduate Alumni are thriving in a variety of academic and academic adjacent careers. Institutions at which they teach and/or hold academic administrative positions include some of the top liberal arts colleges and research institutions in the United States. Our graduate program also prepares doctoral candidates for a variety of related careers, such as European Studies librarian and fellowships program officer.
Katharine Hargrave is Director of the Foreign Language Tutoring Lab and Instructor of French at the College of Charleston. She received her Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University in 2020. Her research focuses on the intersections between music and society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and the French diaspora. Her current book project, Lyric Tragedy and Libretto Print Culture in Early Modern France, argues for the study of operas as literary texts used by the French to serve both political and colonial goals. Through the lens of material culture, she examines how the published format of lyric tragedies had a negative impact on public reception, subsequently diminishing recognition of the genre’s potential to influence contemporary society.
Elizabeth Tuttle is Assistant Professor of French at Michigan State University. She received her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 2019. Her current book project focuses on political activism in 1920s and 30s France. She examines how print culture shaped both feminist and anti-imperialist movements in metropolitan France and throughout the empire. In case studies on Paris, French West Africa, Indochina, and French Guiana her work looks at how women and men used political ephemera to create coalitions and contest their marginalization.
Professor Andrew Jones is Assistant Professor of French at Ursinus College. He received his Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University in 2019. His interdisciplinary teaching and research bridge twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, and History. Specializing in the cinemas and literatures of postwar France, Francophone Africa, and Francophone Eastern Europe, he has a particular interest in representations of trauma. His current project explores the notion of testimony through the lens of cinematic storytelling in the wake of extreme human catastrophes including the Holocaust, Colonialism, and the Gulag.
Undergraduate Alumni
Our Graduate Alumni are thriving in a variety of academic and academic adjacent careers. Institutions at which they teach and/or hold academic administrative positions include some of the top liberal arts colleges and research institutions in the United States. Our graduate program also prepares doctoral candidates for a variety of related careers, such as European Studies librarian and fellowships program officer.
2014 French and Francophone Studies
Department Student Marshal
Leah is the daughter of Jim and Claire Pappas of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A Paterno Fellow and a Schreyer Scholar, she is graduating with degrees in Linguistics, through the Bachelor of Philosophy program, and French and Francophone Studies with a minor in Spanish, Leah studied abroad in Montpellier, France, while completing an internship as a teaching assistant at a French elementary school. She also served as a French tutor for the Penn State Learning Center. She has worked in linguistics labs on campus for six semesters in the past four years, and through this work, she became the recipient of an NSF-PIRE fellowship to do research in Berlin, Germany. After graduation, she plans to teach English abroad before beginning graduate studies.