Amandine Andrade represented the Department of French and Italian
at the University of Arizona in the Institute of French Cultural
Studies that took place at Dartmouth College from June 18th
to July 17th, 2007. The topic of the 2007 Dartmouth French Studies
Institute was “Culture and Death”.
Founded in 1993 under the leadership of Larry Kritzman, the
Committee for the Future of French Studies took up the goals
of restructuring academic interests around interdisciplinary
research and programs.
Every two years, the Institute provides an opportunity for twenty-five
participants from French departments in the US to interact with
some of the most distinguished scholars (from both sides of
the Atlantic) of French literature, history and society, film,
anthropology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in order to set
new directions in the study and teaching of French culture by
examining cultural practices from a variety of interdisciplinary
perspectives.
The 2007 Institute lasted 4 weeks and consisted in daily lectures
from faculty, weekly round tables, weekly workshops devoted
to practical application for classroom use and curriculum development
based on French language materials used in an interdisciplinary
context, as well as practical information and advice on thesis
writing and job interview techniques.
In her presentation on October 4th at the University of Arizona,
Amandine chose to address the four following topics that were
explored during the Institute: the meaning of death in the Middle
Ages, the Renaissance and its approach to death, cadavers and
their symbolic importance at the time of the French Revolution,
and the representation of mass death tolls after World War II
in select movies.
Amandine is a second-year PhD candidate at the University of
Arizona. She received her BA (English language, literature and
civilization) from the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon
and her MA (French) from the University of Kentucky. She also
spent a year in 2001-2002 in Rockville, MD as an au pair. Her
research interests include 18th and 19th century literature,
the French Revolution and personal writings.
Amandine is currently Vice-President of the Association of Graduate
Students in French and teaching French 202 at the University
of Arizona.
