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French Studies Program

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Ongoing Events

French Language Table
: Join us every Thursday, 12:30–1:30pm, for weekly language practice in the College Room in Kline
For information, contact Odile Chilton [email protected]

News
Mason Zoeller '24 is heading to Paris this fall 2023, to pursue his studies of French with the Institute for Field Education (IFE).
Rose Mancuso '25 is also spending the fall 2023 semester studying in Paris with CUPA. 

Viveca Lawrie

Sedona, Arizona, native Viveca Lawrie was discovered by a Bard College Conservatory of Music faculty member, who encouraged her to apply to Bard. The opportunity to attain a double degree, a bachelor of music in trumpet performance and a bachelor of arts in French studies, appealed to her. 

Viveca Lawrie

Viveca Lawrie wasn’t looking to come to Bard. She was discovered—by a member of the faculty at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. 
 
Lawrie recalls that Edward Carroll, who teaches trumpet, heard her play and asked her to apply to Bard. She enrolled in the Conservatory, as a bachelor of music student in trumpet performance, and in the College, as a bachelor or arts student majoring in French studies, with a concentration in medieval studies. “The double degree appealed to me,” says the Sedona, Arizona, native. “Trumpet and French are two things I enjoy.” 
 
Her first impression of Bard was of “a beautiful campus.” Her next impression was one of welcome. “It’s a small community and I felt part of it right away.” She soon met Karen Sullivan, Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Literature and Culture, “and that set me up for the rest of my academic career.” She credits Sullivan with teaching classes “that were 100 percent fun,” and Carroll with “being on board with my love of contemporary music, and help with the technical side” of horn virtuosity. “Bard is very good at matching you with someone,” she says. 
 
At the Conservatory, she and colleagues played together and critiqued one another in “brass class.” “We are a tight-knit group. We really support each other,” she says. “Elsewhere there’s competition, but it’s never been that way here.” 
 
At Bard, “I definitely learned how to write an essay and push the boundaries of how to study.” A surprise was realizing how much she enjoyed academic research and “learning history from the perspective not of the conqueror but of those not in power. This is something that will forever influence how I approach all my research.”
 
With work for her Senior Project in Welsh Arthurian legend, and her Graduation Recital in trumpet, she has little time for extracurricular activities. But she works in the Conservatory audio-visual office on live streaming and recording, and gave AV assistance to a student-organized concert to benefit a Conservatory student whose family is suffering from consequences of COVID-19.
 
For Lawrie, that kind of outreach exemplifies the Bard community. “I meet people who are interested in what I’m doing and I’m open to what they’re doing. It’s healthy that we all show such curiosity.”
 
After graduation, she plans to apply to an MA program in Wales, then a PhD in comparative literature; she also wants to commission composers of contemporary works. “I think people should have multiple options,” she says.
 
How should high school students prepare for Bard? “Come with an open mind. I can’t stress enough how wonderful a preparation Bard’s Language and Thinking Program is for thinking about the world.” She adds, “And come uncomfortable, because you won’t be used to such focused thinking. But don’t feel afraid of it, and be open to listening to others.” 
 
Bard has changed Lawrie’s life in myriad ways. “I am a lot more confident,” she says. “As a homeschooled student, I learned to live on my own. Here I’ve learned how to make friends. I’ve learned—through the support system, counseling, and Upper College students who do tutorials—how to deal when things don’t go my way. Every professor lets me know I can come to them with any problem, especially in the Conservatory. And the French Studies Program has more of a support system than I could imagine, in terms of recommendations, tutoring, wanting to help. Not a lot of colleges have that.”

Post Date: 08-03-2022

Bard College Student Wins Prestigious Study Abroad Scholarship

Rising junior Maxwell Toth ’22, a joint French and American studies major, has been awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for study abroad. Max was awarded $4,000 toward his studies in Paris with the Institute for Field Education, a program that matches undergraduates with international internships aligning with their academic interests.

Bard College Student Wins Prestigious Study Abroad Scholarship

Rising junior Maxwell Toth ’22, a joint French and American studies major, has been awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for study abroad. Max was awarded $4,000 toward his studies in Paris with the Institute for Field Education, a program that matches undergraduates with international internships aligning with their academic interests.

“I’m really honored to have received the Gilman Scholarship,” says Max. “As someone who’s barely traveled outside their home region of New England, studying abroad has been a dream of mine for quite some time.”

Max had originally planned to study abroad this fall, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic he chose to defer his plans to the spring and return to Annandale instead. This fall, he’s taking “a nice smorgasbord of courses,” ranging from The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Contagion: Rumor, Heresy, Disease, and Financial Panic. Outside the classroom, he’ll continue his work as a Peer Counselor, campus tour guide, and Bard nursery school aide—“You can see I wear many hats on campus!”

“Regardless of how my semester abroad may be altered due to the pandemic, I am very excited,” Max says. “Beyond the City of Light, I really want to hop a train to Salzburg at some point and take the ‘Sound of Music’ tour—provided travel restrictions have loosened up by then!”
Learn more about the Gilman Scholarship

Post Date: 07-28-2020

Upcoming Events

  • 12/07
    Thursday
    Thursday, December 7, 2023

    French Table

    Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
    Kline, College Room 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.
     

    12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Kline, College Room

Events Archive

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2022 Past Events

  • Monday, December 5, 2022 
    Véronique Aubouy
    Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    In this performance, I try to summarize Proust's beloved In Search of Lost Time with my own words, as a story of another time which reveals itself contemporary.

    Véronique Aubouy has directed numerous short fiction films and documentaries (Albertine a disparu, 2018; Micaëla Henich, 2017; Je suis Annemarie Schwarzenbach, 2015, among many others). Since October 1993, she has been working on Proust Lu, and films people from all walks of life as they read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, page after page, in a large array of settings. The first six volumes have been recorded to date, for a total of 140 hours and more than 1300 readers. Since 2011, Abouy has performed various versions of “Proust in One Hour”, in French and in English, in France, Italy, the UK and the USA.

  • Thursday, December 1, 2022 
    Listen or even perform literature in different languages.
    Olin Language Center, Room 203 (Tutoring Seminar)  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    If you're interested in poetry and languages this is your event! Come and listen to your peers.

    If you want to participate write to [email protected]. Please send the original text and an English translation. Any type of written art is accepted. Original works and translations are welcome too!

    Food and drinks are provided.

  • Tuesday, November 8, 2022 
    Jackson Smith, Princeton University
    Preston Theater  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    In 1954, just after the start of what would later be called the Algerian War of Independence, François Mitterand—the future French president, then serving as minister of the interior—famously proclaimed, “Algeria is France.” The politician’s words succinctly express the French imperialist project’s purportedly assimilationist approach since, at the time, Algeria was part of France and Algerians were French citizens. And yet, the lasting repercussions of the violent war of decolonization expose these words as an example of the capacity for totalizing categories and claims to obscure the complex mechanisms underlying real historical and political circumstances—namely, the materially inferior status of ethnically Algerian French citizens despite their alleged juridical equality. Against the imaginary uniformity emblematized by Mitterand’s statement, this presentation turns to contemporary works of literature and art whose representations of the Algerian struggle for independence invent and enact forms—which I will describe as broken—that have the power to disrupt the illusions of homogeneity produced by ideological forces. A broken form inhibits any supposedly definitive interpretation so that spectators are left to draw their own tentative connections or simply to submit to the seeming irreparability of the represented object. Examples will include works by the author Nathalie Quintane and the visual artist Kader Attia that make use of poetic, performative, or literal acts of breaking in order to respond to the fragmentary reality of the Algerian War of Independence and put its fundamental brokenness on display.

  • Thursday, November 3, 2022 
    Sarah Kay, Professor of French Literature,
    Thought and Culture, NYU
    Christopher Preston Thompson, Tenor and Medieval Harpist

    Bard Hall  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    This collaborative event – part lecture, part concert – by medieval literary scholar Sarah Kay and early music ensemble Concordian Dawn, under director Christopher Preston Thompson, draws on Kay’s experimental book Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera and Thompson’s companion website of recordings. Together, Kay and Thompson find the sounds of medieval song in the least expected places: stars, the dawn light, the touch of a hand, beasts’ breath, and wild imaginings. The songs on their program range from the earliest alba to Guillaume de Machaut, but their voices sound from the outer spheres to the inner senses.

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