Welcome to the Department of Modern Languages
The Department of Modern Languages offers students of every discipline a wide range of opportunities. Come experience both the intellectual and personal enrichment that comes with learning new languages, and encountering the diverse cultures that they represent. Our department features some of the most skilled teaching faculty on campus, and much of the department's research is aimed at acquisition of additional languages, and enhanced learning through literary and cultural studies as well as technology.
We extend a warm welcome to our new faculty members and A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow:
Mame-Fatou Niang (Ph.D., Louisiana State University), Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, conducts research on contemporary France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Francophone female writers, Maghrebi and Beur texts, Caribbean literature, Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, Media, Gender Studies, and Urban Planning. Her recent research examines the works of second- and third-generation female immigrant writers of the banlieue or suburbs of Paris.
Rémi Adam van Compernolle (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University), Assistant Professor of Second Language Acquisition and French & Francophone Studies, pursues research in second language acquisition, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, classroom discourse, and computer-mediated communication. His recent work on sociocultural theory and second language instructional pragmatics investigates university learners’ development of sociopragmatic capacity in French as a foreign language.
Rebecca Starr (Ph.D., Stanford University), A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, pursues research in bilingual language acquisition, sociolinguistics and language variation in a Mandarin-English dual immersion context, Chinese linguistics, and language variation in a variety of other languages including Cantonese, Japanese, English, and Irish.