FRENCH GRAD STUDENT WINS INTERNATIONAL ESSAY PRIZE

M.A. candidate Camille Dauphin-Persuy has won the 2004 Women in French Graduate Student Essay Prize for her paper "'L'aventure li manderai!': Désir de communications dans les Lais de Marie de France." The paper, which was written under the supervision of E.M. Schenck 1907 Professor of French Grace Armstrong, will be published in the prestigious refereed journal Women in French Studies. Women in French, which is allied with the Modern Language Association, has named Armstrong its 2004 Outstanding Mentor in recognition of the guidance she provided to Dauphin-Persuy.

Dauphin-Persuy, a native of France, entered Bryn Mawr's graduate program in French after earning a master's degree in English and American literature at the Institut Catholique de Paris, where she wrote a thesis on the 20th-century American novelist Carson McCullers. She says that she was first introduced to the work of Marie de France, a somewhat mysterious 12th-century poet who is considered France's first female author, in Armstrong's graduate seminar at Bryn Mawr.

Dauphin-Persuy's winning paper treats the lais of Marie de France, the poet's verse renderings of popular stories of romance and adventure. "My study concentrates on the various forms of communication the women characters staged in those popular poetic tales: discourse, letters, artistic media, et cetera," she explains.

This academic year, Dauphin-Persuy has returned to France to study for the Agrégation d'Anglais, a national examination that will qualify her to teach English and American studies at the high-school and university levels. She plans to return to Bryn Mawr next year to complete her master's degree at Bryn Mawr. Her proposed thesis topic is a study of 20th-century interpretations of two medieval French myths that appear in the work of authors Julien Gracq and John Fowles.

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