French Dept. Ups Interdisciplinary Studies

It’s the middle of the night when Nina Morency Brassard’s cell phone rings—it’s St. Luke’s Hospital, and her services are needed immediately. For Brassard, CC ’09 and a volunteer translator at the hospital, this is part of what it means to be a French major.

Brassard’s experience is representative of a wider shift in the French department toward a 21st-century version of interdisciplinary study. Although the core of the department remains in linguistics, administrators have recently taken steps to encompass cultural themes from all over the French-speaking world.

In 2005, the department added a new major, French and Francophone studies, which focuses on more interdisciplinary aspects of the language and embraces the “recognition that French is no longer synonymous with France,” said Madeleine Dobie, the department’s director of undergraduate studies.

One of the missions, department chair Philip Watts said, is to “open up the language through the French-speaking world and in particular French-speaking Africa.” It’s from this school of thought that Brassard’s work springs—most of the French-speaking patients she works with at St. Luke’s are from francophone Africa and speak with a thick accent that would be difficult for her to understand if she hadn’t spent last summer doing independent research in Mali.

This global way of thinking is reflected in a growing diversity of course offerings, including past classes in Cultural Diversity in Contemporary France, Haitian Fiction, Islam and/in France, and Writing/Rewriting the Caribbean.

The department’s trans-departmental focus is further evident in the diversity of its professors, many of whom also teach in such other areas as African American studies, comparative literature, and history.

“We have recruited several faculty that don’t have the typical training,” Dobie said, referring to the hiring of professors Souleymane Bachir Diagne, whose background is in Islamic philosophy, African philosophy, and logic, and Emmanuelle Saada, who has conducted research on the historical sociology of colonization.

“The French department doesn’t want to be about just language and literature,” Diagne said after a session of his Discovering Existence class. He stressed the importance of cross-curricular learning, saying that “you can’t detach the philosophy” from the traditional study of French language.

According to Watts, the shift in the curriculum has been popular so far. “There’s an increasing number of students interested in this transnational education,” he said.
A goal listed in the formal description of the French and Francophone major is to prepare students for the “contemporary reality” of the French-speaking world. For students like Brassard, this means being ready at 2 a.m. if a Senegalese patient needs help explaining his “douleur abdominale.”

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