French Faculty

Ed Benson
Professor Emeritus of French

Ed Benson earned a Ph.D from Brown University in 1971, then taught at high schools in Providence, at Central Missouri State University and at the Universities of Rhode Island and New Mexico, before coming to UConn in 1998. He wrote Money and Magic in Montaigne in 1995, and many articles on sixteenth-century literature as well as French cinema; his most recent article was “The Screen of History in Clément’s Forbidden Games.” He is currently an assistant editor for literature of the French Review, and the chair of the Executive Committee on the Teaching of Language of the Modern Language Association.

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Anne Berthelot
Professor of French & Medieval Studies

An “agrégée des lettres” and a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Anne Berthelot is now professor of French and Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut. Following her dissertation for the French “Doctorat d’Etat” on the writer in 13th century French literature, she has written numerous books and articles on Medieval literature, focusing especially on the Arthurian legend with a comparatist approach. She is part of the team who is making the so-called Lancelot-Grail Cycle accessible to a large audience in the prestigious series of “La Pléiade” (Gallimard). Her most recent book is a synthetic presentation of the Arthurian legend for the Editions du Chêne, La Légende du roi Arthur (Fall 2004), which has now been translated into German. She is working on a book-length study of the enunciation problems in the Roman de Perceforest, and at the same time is preparing an edition of a little-known Arthurian romance that may be considered as the source for the Perceforest, the Roman des fils du roi Constant.

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Roger Célestin
Co-Chair of French and Francophone Studies programs



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Abdelkader Cheref
Assistant Professor in Residence

After a B.A. in English Language Teaching and Literature, and M.A. in Post WWII African American Literature, Abdelkader CHEREF did his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies.

Eliane DalMolin
Professor of French; Co-Chair of French and Francophone Studies programs

Professor DalMolin is the author of "Cutting the Body: Representing Woman in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema and Freud’s Psychoanalysis." Published in the series “The Body In Theory” at Michigan University Press, 2000. She recently published a cultural history of France "France 1851 to the Present - Universalism in Crisis" with Palgrave, 2007. She also coedited "Beyond French Feminism. Debates on Women, Politics and Culture in France. 1980-2001." Palgrave, 2003. She is currently working on a book on Francophone Louisiana. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Editor in Chief, "Contemporary French and Francophone Studies"(Formerly: "Sites"), with Routledge.

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Rae Beth Gordon
Professor Emerita of French



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Solange Guénoun
Professor of French



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Florence Marsal
Assistant Professor in Residence

Florence Marsal earned a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 2004. Her book Jacques Roubaud: prose de la mémoire et errance chevaleresque, is published by Les Presses Universitaires de Rennes. She has written numerous articles in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (formerly known as Sites), L’Esplumeoir, as well as L’Harmattan publishing house, and Foreign Language Annals.

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Lucy S. McNeece
Professor Emerita of French & Comparative Literature

Lucy Stone McNeece served as co-Chair of the Program in Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies from 1996-2010 and as Head of the Mideast Studies Center at UConn from 2003-2010. She received her PhD from Harvard in 1985 in Romance Literatures. She teaches courses in French and English on the literatures of the Caribbean, Africa, the Maghreb and the Middle East, as well courses in Theater, Film, Film theory and Postcolonial theory. She received and American Institute of Maghreb Studies grant, the Provost�s Large Grant and a Fulbright Research Grant for research in North Africa. She has published on Caribbean, African and North African writers as well as writers of the Near East. Her current research concerns the differing relation between signs and images across cultural boundaries and the impact of ancient traditions upon contemporary authors of the Mediterranean and Arabo-muslim world.

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Valérie Saugera
Assistant Professor Of French



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Jennifer Terni
Assistant Professor of French

My first book, Elements of Mass Society: Paris 1830-1851,  explores the early stages of mass culture with a view to identifying some of its leading characteristics just as they were in the process of crystalizing.  In contrast to top-down approaches that have highlighted technology, class politics or consumption, I shift the emphasis back to the problem of experience. While Parisians were forced to contend with increasing levels of change in the first half of the century, we learn that they propelled that change as much as they endured it. The book asks how and why people invested in practices that made mass society possible in the first place. Ultimately, it turns out that many of these practices can be understood as more or less conscious strategies of cultural adaptation, as efforts to wrestle existential coherence from within the kaleidoscopic transformations that increasingly defined urban life.

I take fashion, networks, virtuality, and a form of abstract sociability organized around interests as opposed to cast as the dominant terms of this transformation. To illustrate their impact, the project explores the role of experience in the development of a media system which includes theater; the emergence of new cultural geographies of consumption and mediation; and the social and representational dynamics of early pop-culture fads. I am developing a second project on nineteenth-century vaudeville, considered as the prototype of the modern sitcom.