Congratulations to Sarah-Grace Heller, who has been appointed by Interim Executive Dean David Horn as Department Chair of the Department of French and Italian! Heller will begin her four year term as Chair this summer.

Heller is Associate Professor of French, specializing in medieval French and Occitan literature, language, and material culture. She has served as Graduate Studies Director at FRIT for multiple terms and as director and associate director of OSU's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Heller's publications include Fashion in Medieval France (Boydell, 2007), A Cultural History of Fashion in a Medieval Age (Berg, 2016), and articles related to sumptuary law, crusade literature, the Roman de la Rose, and the semiotics of culture. Her current project is titled Fashion’s Roots across the Romance Routes of the Mediterranean, 400-1300. She is president of the Société Guilhem IX, which promotes Occitan scholarship, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles.