Research Overview

Our faculty in the Department of French and Italian cover a wide area of specializations and research interests. From Italian novella, French literature and law, and graphic narratives of the Algerian War, to the music and songs of the Congolese diaspora across Europe, their vast knowledge and body of work are influential in their fields.

Faculty Highlights

Robert Barsky

Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Robert Barsky is a 2022 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow whose multidisciplinary research combines social justice, human rights, and border and refugee studies with literary and artistic insights into the plight of vulnerable migrants. He has published widely, and his books on undocumented migrants, refugees, and the milieus of Noam Chomsky and Zellig Harris have been translated into 14 languages. He has also been actively involved in several national and international research projects supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the governments of Canada, Québec, Belgium, and France, and the Dutch Royal Academy.

William Franke

Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian

William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities with a theological (especially negative theological) vision of the traditional disciplines of liberal learning and of the origin and significance of human culture. Franke has published scores of books, and more than a hundred journal articles and book chapters, consisting in large part in philosophically meditative readings of poets ranging from biblical prophets and classical vates to medieval seers and modern visionaries like Rimbaud.

Lynn Ramey

Professor of French and Cinema and Media Arts

Lynn Ramey has expertise in French film, digital humanities, and digital media. She has published about the cultural interactions between Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages and the development of racial consciousness in medieval European literature.

As a former computer programmer, she now works with others to create a series of immersive environments using a video game engine that allows users to play through moments of cultural interaction as medieval travelers. She has been awarded several major grants from the NEH and Mellon foundation to support her work.

Holly Tucker

Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities and Professor of French

Across her research, Holly Tucker focuses on how literature and medicine intersect in the early-modern period. Her work has been featured on NPR, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and journals specific to the field.