Undergraduate Program
A distinguishing feature of the French Program is the careful development and practice of the four different language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). The curriculum has been specifically designed to offer courses at every level for the ongoing development of student proficiency in French. Whatever your level of French, we have a course to meet your linguistic needs. Multiple levels of conversation courses (206, 306, 406) and writing courses (210, 305, 408) ensure that you will receive sustained instruction and support for developing your language skills throughout your undergraduate studies.
You will also discover an equally wide range of literature courses to choose from. Each century, from the Middle Ages to contemporary culture, is taught by one or more specialists in the field. Should you choose to focus on the twentieth century, you can foreground the early part of our century (to explore writers like Gide and Proust) or you may want to focus on more recent literary or cultural phenomena, including film studies. Equally important are the courses devoted to the study of Francophone (French-speaking) countries, such as Mali and Senegal in West Africa, Congo in Central Africa, or Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in North Africa or Quebec (to mention just a few examples).
How these diverse texts are taught is as important to us as redefining what we teach. Recently we created small senior seminars [French 450] whose focus changes from one semester to the next. This course allows students to develop an interest in a topic or genre sometimes spanning several centuries. These seminars are designed to help students hone their independent research abilities, perhaps preparing the way for an Honors thesis project. The French concentration provides a well-rounded set of required core courses (in language, literature, and civilization/culture) for all majors, thereby allowing them the freedom to select an emphasis in either literature, language or culture. In this way, students are able to pursue their particular interests in a more focused manner.
The French/Francophone Studies curriculum is research-driven. Our classes all include independent research projects of different kinds. All students who enroll in our summer study abroad program in Montpellier, France, conduct on-site research projects under the supervision of the program director. The students we send to the IFE program in Paris all conduct field research on site and write a thesis at the end. All French/Francophone Studies majors and all students who are registered in the required capstone senior seminar, FR 450, complete a senior research project. Similarly, the recipients of our McCormack-Reboussin fellowships in French/Francophone Studies all conduct summer research projects which almost always turn into honors theses (most recently, Kristina Walton studied the arcades of nineteenth-century France; Laura Wagstaff wrote a cultural history of the eighteenth-century pipe organ; this summer Eve Grice conducted research at the recently opened museum of immigration in Paris). Finally, a sizeable percentage of our students' class work is creative and research-driven: for example, in FR 310 students produce short movies, and in FR 393 they create documentaries on specific social issues on campus or in the Williamsburg community.
