Spring 2020 was Spring 2020. My two childhood friends and I decided to use our pent-up energy to make something together. I led creative direction and copywriting, they did the design, and we all contributed photography.
I wrote this article as an Editorial Intern with Small Planet Studio, an organization that helps students make the transition back home after spending time abroad. I had just experienced this exact difficulty — returning to my home campus in fall 2019 after spending a year in Paris and Strasbourg, France — so this article allowed me to both explore my own re-entry and contribute to Small Planet Studio's new "Re-Entry Diaries" series on their blog.
My first published poem! Written for Pearl Press’s Issue 6, Lionheart, I decided to write about my French grandparents. My grandpa hailed from Graulhet, a small village in the south of France, and my grandma from Strasbourg, just across the Rhine from Germany. After serendipitously meeting at a football match in 1962, my grandpa’s life desire — to move to the U.S. — compelled them across the sea. Arriving with nothing, they made a life in NYC, having my mom in 1965 and leading long careers: my grandpa worked at upscale restaurants – La Grenouille on E 52nd St, The Water Club – and my grandma dedicated her career to the French national railroad. Sixty years later and after my grandpa’s death at 91 in January 2021, I am only now beginning to realize the treasure of life, love, and a history they gave me.
English: The Psychology of the Colonized in Colonial and Post-colonial Literature
My Senior thesis! Combining my studies in the French language and post-colonialism with my interest in literature, I explored how the psychology of the colonized influenced and was manifested in literature from Algeria and Senegal both during their colonization and after their independence from France. Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi were both indispensable resources for me, and the authors I explored included Leopold Sédar Senghor, Birago Diop, Leïla Sebbar, Assia Djebar.
My Senior Capstone! I identified and analyzed a potentially long-lasting split in the French political left, which splintered into various camps after the 2017 presidential election after holding itself intact for the past 60 years. I argue that nascent social cleavages (rise of populism, shifting attitudes on the European Union) and novel competitive dimensions (climate crisis, rise of far-right, extremism and terrorism) are threatening the solidity of the French left. By localizing the particular history of the French political left within the wider historical event of the rise of populism, I also contributed to a gap in scholarship.
English: Governance in Europe: A Study on the Challenges of Multi-Level Governance in the European Union, from the perspective of the European Consumer Centre France, with a Reflection on European Integration as a Phenomenon and Process (I know it’s a lengthy title, but I promise it sounds better in French!)
The field of European studies is saturated, to say the least. In this project, I attempted to cut through the sludge by taking a unique analytical viewpoint: investigating how my internship location, the European Consumer Centre France, faced challenges and obstacles doing its work because of its position within the complex web of multi-level governance that exists in the European Union. In the end, my analysis proved very useful to them as they were trying to change their legal status to mitigate some of those challenges!
A philosophy course changed my way of viewing the built world, introducing me to the histories and philosophies of everyday life and urbanism. This paper comes from a natural extension between this world and my long-standing research in all things France and postcolonial.
A fun little paper on literature! I tracked and explored existentialist themes, like meaning/lessness and absurdity, in Samuel Beckett’s works Waiting for Godot and Molloy.