Kodjo Adabra, graduate teaching assistant of French in the Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures department, was nominated Peer-Reviewer in the field of francophone literature from West Africa, the Maghreb and the Caribbean, for the post-graduate electronic journal ‘e-pisteme’ based in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Newcastle University, United Kingdom.

Erin O’Brien, a graduating senior in French, was recently chosen by the Alliance Française of Nashville to be an intern in Deauville, France, teaching English to French elementary school students.

Erec R. Koch, professor of French and head of the Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures department, delivered an invited lecture at the doctoral seminar on the epistolary genre in seventeenth-century France, Centre d’étude de la langue et la littérature françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Université Paris-Sorbonne/CNRS. Koch discussed the interrelation of philosophy and literature in philosopher René Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia.

Author: Erec R. Koch
This interdisciplinary study traces the radical changes that occurred in the understanding of the biological body and of human incarnation beginning in the first third of the seventeenth century. It is the first to examine the importance of that new corporeality in the determination of sensibility and passion in French culture of the seventeenth century.

Mary McAlpin, associate professor of French, has been elected to a five-year term as a member of the Modern Languages Association Divisional Committee on Eighteenth-Century French Studies, for the years 2009-2013.