FRIT begins this fall with great new energies. We welcome a big cohort of new graduate students after a strong and competitive admissions cycle. Our doctoral program at is thriving, where some others across the country are seeing hard times. Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences is taking a strong stance in defense of world language and culture education. We have been blessed with two dynamic faculty hires in the past two years. Assistant Professor Ryan Joyce begins this fall in the field of Global French, buoyed the success of creating a summer pilot program called “Kickstart Creole” he created, and the international conference in Martinique he organized on the theme of “Queer Caribbean Visibility and Invisibility.” In his second year, Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Qian Liu is organizing a series on New Directions in Italian Studies, hosting Zoom talks on cultural intersections between people from Italy, Brazil, China, and Somalia. In another international collaboration, Associate Professor Maggie Flinn’s new edited volume, Drawing (in) the Feminine: Bande Dessinée and Women (Ohio State University Press), is garnering top honors. And be sure to get copies of Professor Benjamin Hoffmann’s recent novels Je suis Murakami (2025), about his favorite author, and Les Minuscules (2024), before his new one appears next year: La Guerre des Os/ The Bone War deals with the birth of paleontology. He was just recognized as a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Historical Society. He is building relationships there as he prepares for a term as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge in spring 2026. FRIT is also delighted to host Professor André LeBlanc as a visiting STINT fellow from Sweden’s Dalarna University. Try to attend his talk this October, part of a robust lineup of French Center of Excellence events. While you have your calendar out, six new French films will be screened in the festival organized this fall by Assistant Teaching Professor Adela Lechintan-Siefer. In its second year, the festival moves to the Wexner Center for the Arts, an exciting new collaboration.
Be sure to check out the heartwarming stories by some of our students just returning from study abroad programs. Sure to bring smiles and inspiration! The price of getting abroad is increasing. Students are deeply grateful for the generosity of donors who help them manage to participate in these transformative programs.
You may be aware that Ohio Senate Bill SB-1 is requiring many types of changes for higher education institutions. I am proud of our Department’s creative, proactive, and positive responses to some of the provisions. Our five current majors (French, French and Francophone Studies, Italian, Italian Studies, and Romance Studies) will become tracks under a new combined French and Italian major. This move reflects how closely the French and Italian faculty work together. We all share pedagogical values and methodologies and the mission of promoting plurilingualism and intercultural competency. FRIT is home to the interdisciplinary Romance Studies major (title to be changed to Romance Language Studies for clarity), which bridges the languages and cultures of French and Italian as well Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin. Several of our GE courses have FRIT catalogue numbers and draw on traditions and cultures of both, including the highly successful FRIT 3054: The 21st-Century Skill: Intercultural Competence for Global Citizenship and FRIT 3061: Mediterranean Food Cultures. A faculty group proposed a reconfiguration of our standing committees, to right-size them for our current resources. Our new Events and Engagement and Community and Mentorship committees have hit the ground running, the former planning ways to engage with outside community members through events and K-12 school visits, the latter focused in promoting a strong and healthy internal culture, working on a mentoring plan to benefit members of the department at all ranks.
We have High School immersion days coming up, many years in the planning! We are bringing juniors from Italian classes at De Sales and Bishop Watterson on October 7 to discover the Virtual Reality classroom at the center of the dissertation research of our graduate student Samanta Buffa and do an olive oil tasting guided by Dr. Mark Anthony Arceño. On November 3, French HS students will rotate through immersion programs on the theme of "Design Your Future with French” for Global French Week. I’m thrilled that these community engagement initiatives will be coming to fruition. Being a beacon for French and Italian studies in central Ohio and across the state is part of our vision for serving our state as a land grant institution and flagship institution. We have over 1,500 students in our courses this fall. We are holding strong and constantly innovating.
Forza Bucks! En avant, Buckeyes!
Hoping to see you at an event soon,
Sarah-Grace
