The Department of French & Italian at the University of Kansas is currently accepting applications to its M.A. and Ph.D. programs for fall semester 2017.
Our graduate students work closely with faculty who conduct internationally recognized research in a broad range of fields from medieval to contemporary, including the Francophone world. We seek national and international degree candidates who wish to develop their intellectual talents through rigorous exploration of the literary, artistic, and cultural riches of French and Francophone worlds.
Successful applicants to the M.A and Ph.D. programs receive Graduate Teaching Assistantships with an annual stipend ($15,500) and benefit from full tuition remission. Teaching Assistants receive strong support and guidance through a pre-term orientation, a course on language teaching acquisition and methods, and continued professional and pedagogical development activities.
In addition, the Department of French and Italian also has two specially funded multi-year fellowships for top applicants to the Ph.D. program for the Fall 2017 : a Hall Center for the Humanities four-year Doctoral Fellowship and a Chancellor's five-year Doctoral Fellowship. Each year of these fellowships is funded at $25,000 and includes tuition remission.
In addition to Graduate Teaching Assistantships and Fellowships, other departmental and university research funding opportunities are available: the departmental Cornell and Mahieu Funds support research overseas; the departmental Magerus Fund supports scholarly conference presentations; the Office of Graduate Studies and Hall Center for the Humanities offer many other research awards.
Chimères, one of the nation’s only graduate-run journals in French and Francophone studies, now in its 45th year, offers our graduate degree candidates exceptional opportunities for peer research review and editorial experience. Graduate students also have the opportunity to spend six weeks in France as an assistant with our long-established Summer Language Institute in Paris, or to spend a year in France through our student exchange program with the Université de Franche-Comté in Besançon.
The University of Kansas provides excellent research facilities: our libraries rank in the top 50th nationally for volumes held. Watson Library, the main library, has strong holdings in all fields of French and Francophone studies; Kenneth Spencer Research Library is home to more than 750,000 books and manuscripts; departmental libraries hold collections in art, architecture, dance, engineering, law, history of medicine, maps, and music; Spencer Museum of Art houses more than 37,000 works. Library collections on our Lawrence campus contain more than 4.2 million volumes.
Our campus is consistently ranked in national polls as among the most beautiful. Set on the Kansas River, the city of Lawrence, with a population of 90,000, provides a vibrant yet calm environment with beautiful parks, bustling downtown streets, and a great selection of recreational activities. Downtown offers a large variety of retail shops, restaurants, bars and coffee shops. Lawrence is repeatedly ranked among the top 5 US college towns.
For more information and to contact faculty members, see: http://www.frenchitalian.ku.edu/ or contact the director of graduate studies, Prof. Van Kelly (vkelly@ku.edu, +1-785-864-9073)
To be considered for funding for fall 2016, please submit your application by January 15, 2017. To apply, click here: http://graduate.ku.edu/ku-graduate-application
ABOUT OUR FACULTY:
Allan H. Pasco is the Hall Distinguished Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature. His extensive research contextualizes eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century French literature within the periods’ culture, while emphasizing such major figures as Rousseau, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust.
Antje Ziethen is a specialist in Francophone global literature, the urban novel, postcolonial studies, diaspora/transnational studies, geo-centered literary theory, and gender studies.
Tom Booker’s research interests include the French novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, narratology, and first-person narration (novel, autofiction, autobiography).
Patrizio Ceccagnoli focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Italian Literature and Culture, Italian and European Avant-garde of the 20th century, Giacomo Leopardi and Italian Romanticism, theory and practice of translation, textual criticism and literary theory.
Diane Fourny works on eighteenth-century French literature and culture with a focus on eighteenth-century novel, the history of ideas, Enlightenment and critique of Enlightenment, and autobiography.
Bruce Hayes serves as Chair of Department. His area of research interest is Renaissance studies, particularly theater, popular culture, and Rabelais, with a particular interest in humor studies and post-Reformation religious polemics.
Caroline Jewers specializes in literature and cultural history of medieval France and Occitania, with a focus on chivalric romance and lyric poetry. Her other research interests include the early history of the novel and medievalism.
Van Kelly is serves as Graduate Director. He is a specialist in French and Francophone film, literature, and thought of twentieth-/twenty-first centuries with emphases on poetics, as well as on political, social, and historical imaginaries.
Paul Scott’s area of focus lies in seventeenth-century studies, particularly theater and poetry; early modern spirituality, liturgy, and hagiography; subversion in Ancien Régime France.
Kimberly Swanson is a specialist in second language acquisition and language pedagogy, with a focus on French and English phonology/phonetics and on history of the French language.
Van Kelly, Graduate Director
Department of French and Italian
University of Kansas
1445 Jayhawk Blvd.
Wescoe Hall, Room 2103
Lawrence, KS 66045-7590
USA