The Department of French & Italian is welcoming many new faces to our team this year! We have an amazing group of Undergraduate Student Ambassadors this year. Spanning all our major and minor programs, these undergraduate students are ready to share their remarkable journeys and experiences with prospective and current students and anyone else interested in fun conversation about how world language and intercultural competence can change your life.
Coming to us from all over the United States - and some from overseas - our new members are ready to hit the ground running and make a difference with our students and community. Please help us welcome the following to our FRIT family:
Assistant Professor Qian Mauro Liu
Qian [Mauro] Liu is a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature, aesthetics, and critical theory, with a specific focus on Italy’s transnational networks with the Global South. He is currently completing a manuscript, Urban Exergue: Black Spectrality and the Poetics of Landscape in Contemporary Italy, which theorizes the aesthetic innovation of Afro-Italian literary and visual productions where urbanscape, as the primary dimension, opens up radical new possibilities for reimagining Italy’s postcoloniality. By delving into the ever-shifting epistemologies of Black urban imaginaries and investigating how disrupted notions of temporal linearity and spatial fixity are articulated, this project paradoxically affirms the presence of Black communities within Italy’s metropolitan centers while embracing the production of multifaceted and multidirectional landscapes that pave the way for imaginations. His second book project, Foundations of Displacement: Water, Media, and the Italian Mediterranean, examines how the Mediterranean seawater as a critical environmental medium can shed new light on the political and ethical perceptions of the refugee crisis.
Qian’s writings have appeared in Forum Italicum, Annali d’Italianistica, Modern Italy, Italian Contemporary Youth Television (edited volume), among others. He is also an active translator between English, Italian, and East Asian Languages (mainly Mandarin). His invited book-length translations include John Henderson’s Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (Yale University Press in 2019, Mandarin version in 2023). Qian’s research has been generously supported by the Giorgio Cini Foundation, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities and International Institute, and many other grants and fellowships.
French Associated Faculty Mauro Cazzolla
Mauro Cazzolla holds a PhD in Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Studies from the University of Miami. He is a literary translator and specialist of modern and contemporary French and Francophone literature. His dissertation “Annie Ernaux, explores the challenges of translating a new literary genre defined as autosociobiography. Autosociobiography is a sub-category of autobiography in which individual experiences become collective. Social class is an essential component of autosociobiography and authors such as Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis analyze their lives and the lives of their families through social structures and gender. This dissertation demonstrates how these authors are transfuges de classe, who analyze their social determinisms and the possibility of transformation through autosociobiography. Language also plays a decisive role, since it marks a social distinction: used to depict the reality of different social classes, it carries a socio-political weight that needs to be conveyed when it is translated. Through the translation analysis of several autosociobiographies, a personal translation project, and a series of interviews of Ernaux, Louis and their Italian translators, this research shows the stakes of translating an auotosociobiography and provides translators with valuable tools to respect these authors’ literary and socio-political intentions. This dissertation was supported in its final year by the two fellowships: the Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship and the Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship.
Mauro also holds a MA in Interpreting and Translation Studies from the University of Trieste and a BA in Intercultural Mediation from the SSML Carlo Bo in Bari. He also taught courses in translation and French language at the University of Matera and at the Université Paris Nanterre. As a literary translator he has translated contemporary French and Francophone authors such as Maud Ventura, Ouissem Belgacem, Vincent Almendros and Anne Godard.
French Associated Faculty Pauline Remy
Avonelle Pauline Remy hails from an island in the Eastern Caribbean called Dominica…NOT to be confused with the Dominican Republic. She subsequently completed her B.A in Science du Langage et de la Communication at the Université de Franche-Comte in Besançon, France. Upon completion of her B.A, she returned to Dominica where she taught high school French for four years. Her ambition to pursue French at a higher level took her first to Ohio University and then to the University of Iowa where she earned respectively, her M.A in French and Francophone Studies and her PH. D in French and Francophone World Studies. Her dissertation, Infiltrating the Colonial City through the Imaginaries of Métissage: Saint Louis (Senegal), Jérémie (Haiti) and Saint-Pierre (Martinique), explores how the paradigm of métissage [hybridity] is fundamental to observe the intricacies of circulating cultures, social transformations, female economic agency, and identity formation in the towns of Saint-Louis in Senegal and Saint-Pierre in Martinique during colonial times, as well as in the town of Jérémie in post-revolutionary Haiti. My research agenda also includes tourism in former colonial spaces (Haiti, Jamaica, The Dominican Republic, Morocco, among others). This scholarship stems from my interest in the continued (mis)representations of black and brown bodies in the neo-colonial imaginary. Marginal masculinities in the Caribbean and the Maghrebin world are also part of my ongoing scholarship agenda.
Outside of research and teaching language, culture and literature courses, I enjoy traveling, playing word games, reading and outdoor activities.
French Associated Faculty Rebecca Wetzel
Rebecca Wetzel graduated in 2018 with a Bachelors in French and again in 2019 with her masters from Miami University. She continued on to become a Dean’s Doctoral Fellow at the University of Kansas and received her PhD in 2024. In her dissertation “Montaigne’s Other Bodies: Onanism, Animals, and Anthrophagy in the Essais,” she studies the changing perception of the human condition during the French Renaissance through the lens of the contemporary European’s understanding of the body. Her focus on the human body continues into Rebecca’s interest in theatre as she studies how the body is used to convey meaning on stage.
French & Francophone Studies Graduate Student Ogechi Mgbudem
Ogechi Mgbudem (she/her) is a Master's student in the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University. She attained her B.A. In French and Francophone Studies (cum laude) at The Ohio State University in 2020. Before returning to Ohio State, she taught English at the secondary level in Périgueux, France. Her current research interests are in Sexuality as depicted in 20th-century French film.
