Graduate Program Overview
The graduate program in French Studies at Louisiana State University presents an exciting opportunity for students to live and work in one of the richest cultural environments of the Francophone world, situated at the crossroads tying Francophone Canada by Cajun history, to France and to Francophone Africa and the Caribbean by Creole history, and to Francophone Vietnam by recent immigration.
Rated as one of the strongest programs in the field by the National Research Council, we have also been named a centre d'excellence by the Cultural Services office of the French Ambassador to the United States, an honor given to only 15 university French programs in the United States.
In addition to a wide range of course offerings covering the entire history of metropolitan French literature and culture, from medieval epic to contemporary prose, poetry, theater, and film, we offer courses in the Francophone literatures and cultures of North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Quebec, and Louisiana. A wide range of theoretical perspectives are represented in the teaching and research interests of the department's literature faculty, including interdisciplinary studies in literature and psychoanalysis, philosophy, gender theory, feminism, semiotics, post-structuralism, technoculture, and the visual arts. The department's linguistics faculty offer courses and conduct research in sociolinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, second-language acquisition, and Louisiana varieties of French and English.
Our program offers graduates to work withoutstanding faculty. Among them you will find Kevin Bongiorni (20th century literature, Italian film); Sylvie Dubois (sociolinguistics); Jeff Humphries (comparative literature, 19th century literature, Amero-Caribbean Francophone literature and culture); Kate Jensen (17th and 18th century literature; women's writing); Jeffrey Leichman (18th century literature and theatre); Alexandre Leupin (psychoanalysis, medieval literature); Pius Ngandu (Sub Saharan African Francophone literature); Rosemary Peters (19th century literature); John Protevi (contemporary French philosophy); Adelaide Russo (20th century literature); Greg Stone (medieval and Renaissance literature, literary theory); and Jack Yeager (Southeast Asian Francophone literature, gender studies).
We maintain close ties with faculty members in other departments at LSU who conduct research in Francophone subjects, including the Anthropology, English, Philosophy, Art History departments, as well as the Law Center. Our faculty members are also active participants in the interdisciplinary Program in Comparative Literature and the Program in Women's and Gender Studies. Students are encouraged to design courses of study that include a cluster of courses in an affiliate field.
LSU offers the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in French. The M.A. consists of 36 hours of course work (with thesis option, 30 hours). An optional minor field consists of an additional 6 to 9 hours of course work. The Ph.D. involves 27 additional hours of course work plus the dissertation. For details on program information and requirements, please see the Guide to Higher Studies.
LSU Libraries have research collections of 3 million volumes and are ranked 46th in size among academic members in the US and Canada by the Association of Research Libraries. LSU Library, the university's main library, contains more than 24,240 volumes relevant to French Studies. Additional materials are held in Hill Memorial Library, which has more than 200,000 volumes, over 10 million manuscript items, and hundreds of thousands of photographic images. Hill’s holdings comprise the most comprehensive collection in the world relating to Louisiana, past and present. Students are encouraged to work with materials in the Hill Memorial Library, the world’s largest collection of Louisiana historical materials, including many important Francophone collections. Further relevant materials are also held in LSU’s Hebert Law Center Library, which is one of the twenty largest academic law libraries in the United States. In addition to the standard Anglo-American legal materials, the library has substantial collections of foreign, international, and comparative law.
In addition to gaining valuable classroom experience in teaching language courses, LSU French Studies graduate students also have the opportunity to work closely with senior faculty as seminar instructors for innovative “Francophone Texts and Contexts” courses taught to advanced undergraduates. Recent topics have included “New Wave, New Novel” (on 1950s and 60s French film and literature); “French Literature and Culture of the Caribbean and Africa” (on the hybrid culture -- part European, part African, part native American -- created by the slave trade); and “Myth, Ritual and Social Structure” (on the intersection of French, Senegalese and Louisiana cultures in the “Br’er Rabbit” folktales; the course includes fieldwork at the important Creole plantation, “Laura,” located just south of Baton Rouge). Other opportunities for graduate student teaching include the LSU in Paris and the LSU in the Ubaye Valley summer programs.