DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

We are happy to announce that Phil Hoskins has won the Meteor Staff Award which honors outstanding staff members, employed in new positions, who have demonstrated in a relatively short time excellence in their position and contributions to their department. We congratulate Phil for this achievement and well deserved honor and thank him for his professionalism, dedication, imagination, and warmth, qualities he brings to every task and every interaction.

We are pleased to announce that Marie Thérèse Pent has received the Faculty Honor Roll award, organized by the Associated Students Government. The Faculty Honor Roll recognizes exceptional professors who go above and beyond expectations. We are grateful to Marie-Thé for her continued dedication to our students and program.

Brittany Murray defended her dissertation, titled Uncertain Time: Historicity and French Culture in the Nineteen-­Seventies. The project is a period study of the decade following May 1968 bringing together phenomena as disparate as science fiction, self-managed factories, écriture féminine, and lesbian utopia.  It has a special emphasis on questions of historical narrative and futurity, drawing upon Marxist, feminist, and queer theoretical traditions.

Her committee consisted of Scott Durham, Vivasvan Soni, and Christopher Bush as chair. Please join us in congratulating Brittany on this important milestone and in wishing her continued success as she moves on to the next stage of her career.

Joseph's thesis “Imagining a New Britain: The Politics of Perlesvaus” reframes the role of prose romance in narratives of nationhood and politics. Perlesvaus, Le Haut livre du Graal, shows us how romance can be a political genre, articulating forms of life and politics that challenge the reader to reimagine medieval politics and power. His dissertation argues that in Perlesvaus we find an early literary experiment engaged in the fantasy of binding the spiritual and physical health of king and kingdom—what I identify as a “biopolitical” freight that links the body of the king to the body politic in prose romance. He shows how Perlesvaus articulates this biopolitics in ways that challenge the modern conceptions and iterations of biopolitics. In doing so, he argues that it posits new ways of looking at nation and sovereignty in medieval literature that force us to question the relationship between literature and politics in the medieval and modern periods.

His committee consisted of Barbara Newman, Alessia Ricciardi, Cynthia Nazarian and William Paden as chair. Please join us in congratulating Joseph on his tremendous achievement and in wishing him continued success as he moves forward with his academic endeavors!

Tom Simpson has been selected the recipient of the CLI Award for Excellence in Foreign Language Teaching. The selection committee recognized that Tom's contributions to language teaching and learning at Northwestern both inside and outside the classroom have been truly exceptional and honor his pedagogical and scholarly accomplishments with this award. It is our pleasure to congratulate Tom on this well deserved recognition.

It is our great pleasure to announce that both Paola Morgavi and Patricia Scarampi have received the Faculty Honor Roll award, organized by the Associated Students Government. The Faculty Honor Roll recognizes exceptional professors who go above and beyond expectations.