Susan Kevra

Principal Senior Lecturer of French & Italian

In 2001, Professor Kevra arrived at Vanderbilt from Azay-le-Rideau, France where she had spent a year traveling around France and Western Europe teaching dance and learning a thing or two about French hospitality, culture, food, and dance. Her interest in these topics carries over into the classroom, with music, dance and food serving as a vehicle for understanding francophone cultures.

Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Dr. Kevra taught at Marlboro College (Marlboro, VT), Amherst College (Amherst, MA), and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA). She received her PhD from UMass-Amherst in 1998 in French and Francophone Literatures and completed a doctoral dissertation entitled, “Body Images: Representations of the Body in the Novel of French Canada and Quebec.” During her time in Northern New England, she benefitted from the proximity to Quebec to get to know the Belle province. She has published a range of articles on the literature and culture of Quebec, but her interest in francophonie extends beyond Quebec. In 2006, her translation of Gospel and Culture in an African Context: The Tetela-Kusu-Anamongo People and the Church by Joseph Onema Fama was published. After participating as an NEH fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago where she studied French Travel Writing from the Americas (1500-1800), Dr. Kevra went on to develop a First Year Writing Seminar, “The French Experience in the Americas” and an upper-level literature course on French travel writing. Professor Kevra has devised several popular courses in which history, literature and popular culture intersect, including an advanced French course, “À Table: La culture culinaire de France,” and two American Studies courses, “Food for Thought: American Foodways,” and “American Social History through Dance.”

Her current research examines the life and films of the French animation filmmaker and environmental activist, Frédéric Back, whose films carry poignant environmental messages for our climate-changed world.

She has organized a number of concerts on the Vanderbilt campus by the Quebecois traditional bands, Genticorum, Le Vent du Nord, and Raz-de-Marée. A clarinetist and singer, she is in demand as a leader of French bal folk workshops and performs French music in her band, Constellation.