Elizabeth M
- Research Program Mentor

PhD at Columbia University

Expertise

European and Middle East History, Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, French Literature,

Bio

I was raised in Cambridge, UK, and completed my undergraduate degree in Modern History and French Literature at the University of Oxford in 2008. I then moved to New York (finally living in a big city!) to start my PhD in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. During years as a PhD candidate, I taught in the Core Curriculum at Columbia, a one-year intensive core curriculum course for first-year students in Columbia College covering major literary works in the Western canon from Homer to Toni Morrison. I was also a Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT for one year, teaching courses in French Cultural Studies and History. I was awarded my PhD in 2017, which looked at the afterlife of the French Empire in Lebanon. I moved to Stanford University for a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, where I taught classes on the French Empire, Islam and the Global Revolutions of 1968. I was a British Academy Fellow in the UK, and am now an Assistant Professor of French, working on my second book on international students in France after 1945.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Trials and Memory in Post-War France

My student worked on an extended research paper on the trial of a Nazi War criminal in post-war France. She conducted research in French and English.

A Collection of Poems

My student wrote and edited a collection of poems (which he then used to send alongside his college applications).

A Girl in Haarlem

My student wrote a five-act play based on the 80 years Dutch Wars of Independence.

Languages I know

French, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish

Teaching experience

I have taught at Columbia, MIT, and Stanford (I list all of my classes below). I have also mentored and tutored over 15 students in French language/literature for exams, or for life skills. As a founding faculty member for the non-profit Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, colleagues and I sought to make college-level humanistic study available to the wider community. Teaching Camus in a workers’ run restaurant in Manhattan, I considered it my job to help develop a trusting, close-knit intellectual community among colleagues some of whom had never been in a classroom before. Conceiving and teaching a class for high school seniors at Barnard College on Counterculture in World Literature and Film, I sought to create an environment in which students can think and take risks with one another. Courses designed and taught at Stanford University, California 2019 “How to Build an Empire,” Winter 2018 “Islam in the Western Imagination,” Fall “Global 1968,” Spring Courses designed and taught at MIT, Cambridge, MA (in French) 2016 “Religions, Identities and Minorities in France and the French Empire,” Spring 2015 “French and Francophone Countercultures,” “France and the Mediterranean,” Fall Courses designed and taught at Barnard College, NY (in English) 2016 “Counterculture in World Literature and Film,” Liberal Arts Intensive Summer Program, July Courses taught at Columbia University, New York, NY 2017, 2014-2015 Literature-Humanities. A full-year core curriculum course for first-year students in Columbia College covering major literary works in the Western canon from Homer to Toni Morrison. 2011-2016 French 1204, Rapid Reading and Translation 2011 French 1202, Intermediate French 2010 French 1201, Intermediate French 2010 French 1102, Elementary French 2009 French 1101, Elementary French Community education courses: 2016 Faculty, “Camus and The Stranger: from existentialism to post-colonialism,” The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, New York, 11 July-1 August 2015 Co-Faculty for “Fanon: Anticolonialism and Revolution,” The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, New York, 11-25 June