The French Center of Excellence is proud to announce its Spring 2025 lecture and programming series. The following events are free and open to the public. Please register using the links below.

• Professor Morgane Cadieu, "Annie Ernaux and the Poetics of Social Mobility" - Professor Cadieu holds a PhD from Cornell University and specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone prose, experimental fiction, randomness in literature and theory, materialist philosophies (especially atomism and feminism), spaces studies, narratives of social emancipation and migration, and the aesthetics of trains. The Cadieu lecture will take place on Monday, February 3 from 4:00pm-5:00pm in Thompson Library, Multipurpose Room 165. Light refreshments will be served after the talk. To register, click here or call 614-247-4105.
• Professor Chase Cormier - Jules Verne Lecture in Creative Writing, “One Word at a Time, One Breath at a Time: How Chase Cormier Writes Now” - Professor Chase Cormier holds a PhD in Francophone Studies from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he also served as editor of Feux Follets, an in-house review of creative writing and visual art from 2018 to 2023. His research examines literary trends in Francophone North America, with a particular interest in Louisiana French literature and food. He is the founder and host of Louisiane en vers, a bilingual podcast that explores current poetic trends in Louisiana and pays special attention to the therapeutic role of poetry in the region by responding to intergenerational trauma with community healing. The Jules Verne Lecture in Creative Writing  will take place on Thursday, March 20 from 4:00pm-5:00pm in Thompson Library, Multipurpose Room 165. Light refreshments will be served after the talk. To register, click here or call 614-247-4105.
• Professor Silyane Larcher, "Afrofeminists! How to the empire’s grand-daughters take on French universalism" - Originally from Martinique, Professor Silyane Larcher is a political theorist and a social scientist. She received her MA in philosophy (with major in political philosophy) from the Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and her PhD in Political Studies from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Before arriving at Northwestern, from 2015 to 2023 she was a tenured Research Scholar in Political Science at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. The Larcher lecture will take place on Thursday, April 17 from 4:30pm-5:30pm in Hagerty Hall 180. Light refreshments will be served after the talk. To register, click here or call 614-247-4105.

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These events are sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series is also supported by the following Departments and Centers at Ohio State African American & African Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, Germanic Languages & Literatures, English, the Humanities Institute, and the Center for Languages, Literatures, & Cultures.

In December of 2020, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States selected the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University to join its prestigious network of Centers of Excellence. OSU’s Center of Excellence has the goal of promoting French and Francophone culture in the Midwest and beyond.