As the Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in French at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, I am proud to share information on our department that should be of interest to any students looking to pursue a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies.
As of 2013, four successful applicants received five-year fellowships that provide $25,000 of support per year for five years as well as health insurance. In exchange, students teach one course per semester for the second, third, and fourth years of their fellowship at one of the CUNY colleges.
Reviewers recently rated our program as one of the finest and most innovative in the USA. They emphasized our program’s double objective : educating generalists to teach traditional courses and specialists in francophone literature, French cinema, gender studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies. Our recent graduates defended theses entitled “Women, Castles, and Power in Early Modern France : The Case of the Duchess of Montpensier (1627-1693),” “The Obscene Bachelor : Humor and Horror in Guy de Maupassant’s Writings,” “The Algerian War Era through a Twenty-First Century Lens : French Films 2005-2007,” and “Inscription du passé colonial dans la littérature urbaine contemporaine.” Our recent alumni have landed jobs at Vassar College, Augustana College, and Saint John’s University. Previous alumni also teach at Bennington College, Swathmore College, University of California at Irvine, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Our multidisciplinary program attracts students from Canada, France, Great Britain, Haïti, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, and the USA with a range of backgrounds not necessarily restricted to literature. Among our recent successful candidates we count two art historians, two professional translators, a journalist, a philosopher, and a political scientist. These students add different and welcome perspectives to classroom exchanges and make our program an intellectually vibrant place to study.
Last but not least, our program is currently organizing the annual 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium in collaboration with Columbia University and New York University, which is set to take place in New York City the weekend of March 6-8, 2014.
Further details on our program may be found on our website here : http://www.gc.cuny.edu/french. The deadline for submitting applications for fellowships beginning in September, 2014 is January 6, 2014.
Julia Przybo, jprzybos@gc.cuny.edu