Faculty

Grace Armstrong (Ph.D., Princeton) Eunice Morgan Schenck 1907 Professor, is a specialist in the French Middle Ages as well as stylistics. Among her courses are "Le Chevalier, la femme, et le prêtre", "Printemps de la parole féminine", "Voix médiévales et échos modernes", and "La Femme: sujet/objet". She also has taught an interdepartmental course "Medieval Women". She is a recipient of the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and the "Outstanding Mentor" Award from Women in French. . A graduate of Bryn Mawr's Institut at Avignon, she has taught there often and has twice been a visiting professor at Princeton.

Benjamin Cherel (D.E.A., Université de Grenoble) joins the department as Lecturer in French. A specialist in language pedagogy, he teaches all levels from elementary through the advanced style course. As a sociologist, he also plays a significant role in the French culture track.

Catherine Dana (Ph.D., Yale University), Visiting Assistant Professor, is a specialist of 20th-C. French and Francophone novels with a special interest in Holocaust studies and postcolonial literature of the Mediterranean Basin. The author of critical studies as well as fiction and nonfiction, she comes to us from positions on both sides of the Atlantic. She teaches “La Mosaïque France” as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on Algerian women writers in France and Camus.

Francis Higginson (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley), Associate Professor of French, is a comparatist who works in 20th-C. French and Francophone literatures (North and West Africa, the Antilles and Quebec). He is interested in the relationship between music and literature (the subject of a graduate seminar he teaches) and, particularly, in the nexus between this relationship and the construction of race. In addition to teaching "Missionaires et cannibales: de Malraux à Modiano1930-1995", he teaches "Regards croisés: France/Maghreb" and courses on surrealism and French and Francophone crime fiction.

Nancy Vickers joined the Bryn Mawr College community as its seventh president on July 1, 1997. She came to the College from the University of Southern California, where she was the dean of curriculum and instruction in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and professor of French, Italian and Comparative Literature.

Vickers is a scholar in the fields of literary and cultural studies. Her interests range from Renaissance poetry to the transformation of the lyric genre as a result of changing technologies such as music video and television. She has published numerous articles, including "Blazing Beauties: Marot's Poetic Anatomies," in the 1997 volume The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, and "Lyric in the Video Decade," in the journal Discourse, volume 16.1.

She is the co-editor of Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Differences in Early Modern Europe and A New History of French Literature, for which she and her coeditors received the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize in 1990. Vickers also coedited The Medusa Reader, an interpretive anthology of texts referring to Medusa from Homer to the present day, which will be published in the fall of 2001.

Vickers received her bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1967 and her master's and doctorate in philosophy degrees from Yale University in 1971 and 1976, respectively. She taught French and Italian at Dartmouth College from 1973 until 1987, when she joined the University of Southern California faculty.

Department of French • Bryn Mawr College • 101 N. Merion Avenue • Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 • (610) 526-5083 • Fax (610) 526-7479• bstiner@brynmawr.edu