La basilique du Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre, Paris
Why Davis? | Program Requirements | Research Facilities | Cost of Study Financial Assistance | Admission | The Community | Faculty | Courses | Apply Now
Why Study French at UC Davis?
The Graduate Program in French at UC Davis provides graduate students with a strong base of historical coverage, spanning from the Middle Ages to the present including Francophone Studies. The department also offers a strong emphasis on past and recent developments in literary and critical theory that influence French Scholarship. Faculty interests such as linguistics, comparative literature, critical theory, film studies, and women's studies ensure that students are exposed to interdisciplinary approaches and are invited to integrate these perspectives into their program.
Students may work not only with faculty in the Department of French and Italian but also with faculty in related fields of interest. Students may pursue a Designated Emphasis (Graduate Minor) in the following:
- African American and African Studies
- Classics and the Classical Tradition
- Critical Theory
- Feminist Theory and Research
- Second Language Acquisition
- Studies in Performance and Practice
The doctoral program is distinguished by individualized study and intensive collaboration between faculty and students. The department prides itself on its strong tradition of mentorship that encourages students to develop a truly unique course of research. In addition, the department provides its Graduate Students with numerous academic and teaching opportunities. Each year the department sponsors a graduate student exchange with the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Graduate Students are also encouraged to take advantage of the many academic resources offered by the Davis Humanities Institute.
Click here for more information about applying to UC Davis.
Program Requirements
The French Department offers a wide-ranging course of study leading to the Ph.D. degree. Students may choose either the literature or the linguistics track, according to their areas of interest. Students are expected, with the approval of his or her advisor, to complete a minimum of 12 graduate seminars. Candidates are encouraged to take courses in a great variety of areas in order to develop:
1) a comprehensive knowledge of French
2) the ability to use specific critical methods
3) a mastery of the chosen field of concentration.
All candidates must also demonstrate proficiency in one foreign language in addition to English and French. Within one year of completing course work, the candidate is expected to pass a qualifying examination demonstrating in-depth knowledge of the history of French literature or the subfields of linguistics. The candidate must also complete a successful defense of his or her proposed dissertation topic. Ph.D. work concludes with the writing and acceptance of the dissertation.
Research Facilities
UC Davis' extensive Shields Library numbers nearly 2.5 million volumes, including more than 41,000 periodicals and serials. The library is ranked as one of the 25 best research collections in the nation and its collections in the Humanities are adequate for all but the most specialized research. Volumes not available on campus may be readily and promptly obtained from any of the nine UC campuses through interlibrary loan. In addition, a university bus service provides daily transportation to and from the Berkeley campus 60 minutes away.
Cost of Study (2007-2008)
Residents
Fall 2007 |
Winter 2008 |
Spring 2008 |
Annually | |
Graduate Student Fees |
$3,217.16 |
$3,217.16 |
$3,217.16 |
$9,651.48 |
Total Cost |
$3,217.16 |
$3,217.16 |
$3,217.16 |
$9,651.48 |
Non-Residents
Fall 2007 |
Winter 2008 |
Spring 2008 |
Annually | |
Graduate Student Fees |
$3,315.16 |
$3,315.16 |
$3,315.16 |
$9,945.48 |
Graduate Student Non-Resident Tuition |
$4,898 |
$4,898 |
$4,898 |
$14,694 |
Total Cost |
$8,213.16 |
$8,213.16 |
$8,213.16 |
$24,639.48 |
Fees for one year (3 quarters) of study thus amount to approximately $9,651.48 for California residents and $24,639.48 for international students and for nonresident U.S. citizens. The latter, if financially independent of parental support, can become exempt from tuition costs during the second year of graduate study by making appropriate arrangements to establish residency in California. Applicants with excellent academic records and those awarded teaching assistantships can apply for Nonresident Tuition Fellowships.
Financial Assistance
Teaching Assistantships
A limited number of teaching assistantships are available to
qualified students even in their first year. The current rate
(2007-2008) for a teaching assistantship at 50% time (the normal load)
is $15,610.50 per academic year. In addition to this salary, TAs receive a partial fee remission. For current remission rates, click here.
Students who wish to be considered for
teaching assistantships in French or any other departments or programs
should request applications directly from Julia Simon, Graduate Advisor, and should complete and return them as early as possible, but in no case later than March 1st.
Scholarships and Fellowships
University scholarships and fellowships are available to students
with exceptional academic qualifications. Applications will be available as part of the online application process and must be submitted, along with all other parts of the application, by January 15th. U.S. Citizens must also complete the FAFSA.
Other Financial Aid
Information concerning grants, loans, and work-study assistance is available from the Financial Aid Office. Inquires concerning housing costs and availability should be directed to Student Family Housing or the Community Housing Office.
Admission
Admission to the program is based upon the applicant's potential for scholarship, research, and teaching, along with evidence of a commitment to the advanced study of literature and culture. Decisions on admission and financial awards are based on all available information including GRE scores, undergraduate record, letters of recommendation, personal statements, and a writing sample to be submitted with the application. Whenever possible, the department will arrange for campus visits. A preliminary consultation with the Graduate Advisor is strongly encouraged. Please contact Professor Julia Simon at jsimon@ucdavis.edu or (530) 754-7839.
For those applicants who wish to be considered for fellowships or financial aid, the deadline is January 15th. Otherwise, the deadline is April 1st. For more information on how to apply, please click here.
The Community
The City of Davis (population 64,000) and the adjacent campus are located in the Central Valley, 12 miles west of the capital city of Sacramento and 75 miles east of San Francisco. While maintaining a college-town atmosphere, the spacious campus (the largest in the area, and the third largest in enrollment, among the nine campuses of the UC system) enrolls 29,087 students, 6,337 of whom study in graduate and professional schools. In recent years, UC Davis has been consistently among the most sought-after of the UC campuses owing to its outstanding academic reputation and its congenial atmosphere for living and study. UC Davis presents frequent lectures, concerts, art exhibits, films, and theater. The cultural resources of Berkeley and San Francisco are within ninety minutes driving time from Davis, while Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada and the coastal communities of Santa Cruz, Monterey, Carmel, and Big Sur are only slightly more distant.
Program Faculty
- Bruce Anderson, Ph.D. (Indiana University). He specializes in French linguistics, with emphasis on second language acquisition, syntax-morphology, and syntax semantics interfaces. His publications include articles in Second Language Research and Language Acquisition.
- Marc Eli Blanchard, Agrégé de Lettres (University of Paris). He trained as a classicist, but maintains a strong interest in all centuries of French, Caribbean, and Cuban Literature and Culture. His books, La Révolution et les Mots, Description: Sign, Self, Desire, and In Search of the City: Engels, Baudelaire, Rimbaud , address various topics in French literature and culture from the Renaissance to the present in the light of history and theory. His teaching and research interests draw from topics in French poetry, literary criticism, linguistics, philosophy, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Anthropological and Cultural History.
- Noah Guynn, Ph.D. (Yale University). Recipient of UC Davis' 2004 Excellence in Teaching Award. He is a specialist in medieval literature, philosophy, and theology; gay and lesbian studies; and literary and critical theory. His books Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages is forthcoming in The New Middle Ages Series at Palgrave Macmillian. He is currently working on a second book on ethics and politics in late-medieval and early-modern theater, especially farce. Guynn's teaching interests extend from medieval to modern literature, and his course offerings regularly include a survey of French drama and a large lecture course on Adam and Eve.
- Eric Russell Webb, Ph.D. (University of Texas, Austin). He
specializes in phonology and phonetics, focusing on the role of
biomechanics in the grammaticalization of sound structure. He is
especially interested in the evolution of language, the emergence of
Creoles and the interface between related grammars, e.g. Romance,
dialect, register. He has published works in Linguistica Atlantica, The Morphology and Phonology of Creoles, the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies and the Journal of Language and Linguistics, among others.
- Julia Simon, Ph.D. (University of California, San Diego). She specializes in 18th-century French literature and culture, particularly the work of the philosophes, with special emphasis on the relevance of Enlightenment social, political, moral, and aesthetic theory today. She is the author of Beyond Contractual Morality: Ethics, Law, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century France and Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot and is currently working on a project concerning eighteenth-century music theory.
- Recent Visiting Scholars. The French Department regularly hosts visiting scholars who give individual lectures or quarter-long seminars. Recent visiting scholars include Michel Feher, Marcel Hanaff, Hafid Gafaiti, Frederic Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, Carla Freccero, Peggy Kamuf, Mitchell Greenberg, and David Hult among others.
Cooperating Faculty
- Moradewun Adejunmobi, Ph.D. (University of Ibadan, Botswana). She is the author of J.J. Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca and the forthcoming book Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Natives in West Africa.
Courses: Although courses are not repeated on a regular basis, the following course list should give an idea of the types of courses generally offered by department faculty.
An American in Paris.
This course will examine the long, rich history of cultural and intellectual interactions between France and America. We will begin with Jefferson's celebrated trip to Paris in 1784 and will continue through the 1980s with Fredric Andrei's film Diva , about an African-American opera singer performing in Paris. In between, we will explore the legacy of American expatriate communities in Paris, especially surrounding Gertrude Stein; representations of Paris in the works of American authors, artists, musicians, and filmmakers; the reception of French fashion by the American public; representations of race, gender, and sexuality in a transnational setting; the responses of French artists and intellectuals to the American scene in Paris; and Parisian writers' reverse constructions of America. (Blanchard/Guynn)
Structuralism and Beyond.
If you want to make sense of some crazy ideas that have invaded the science of language since the beginning of the 20th century and understand how the flooded even literary theory, come and dare to make acquaintance with the work of thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ferdinand de Saussure, Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoi, Louis Hjelmslev, Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Roman Jakobson, Zellig S. Harris, Gustave Guillaume, and many more. You will fully understand (I hope!) the nasty and obscure words that plague the writings of your most beloved contemporary critics and linguists. And after all, we will struggle together with most complicated discourses in order to understand how the Chomskyan phenomenon was born in this country in spite of ?every reasonable doubt?; what American linguistics owes to the Old World and vice-versa; why generative grammars and mathematics have such a magic power over linguists on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific.
Women Writers of the French Renaissance.
From the intellectual upheaval of the ?querelle des femmes? to the social and political chaos of the wars of religion, the French Renaissance was a time marked by a profound questioning of categories and hierarchies of all kinds. In the realms of theology and philosophy, those who pursued such questioning were soon labeled, respectively, reformers and skeptics. What were the consequences for those who pursued a questioning of gender, and what were the possibilities of those writers whose own gendered status marked the production and reception of their work? Can we speak of a ?proto-feminism? in this era despite the worst excesses of contemporary Gallic misogyny? This seminar will address these questions by focusing on the work of three major writers of the period: a poet (Louise Labé), a writer of prose fiction (Marguerite de Navarre) and a philosopher (Marie de Gournay). (Van den Abbeele)
Medieval Romance.
This course will examine the development of medieval romance from the Romances of Antiquity to Béroul and Chrétien de Troyes, and culminating in the allegorical masterpiece of the French middle ages: Guillaume de Lorris' and Jean de Meun's ?Roman de la Rose?. More specifically, we will investigate the use of normative codes of behavior (erotic, political, chivalric) and formal literary structures (rhetoric, metaphor, allegory, verse) to master, contain, or control threats to the ethical ideal commonly known as ?courtoisie?. We will also be interested in pointing to the impossibility of such mastery?and the consequences thereof?by locating ambiguities, disjunctions, and aporias within romance tropes. Building on recent theoretical approaches to Romance, we will focus on the dialectic of confinement and errancy, perfection and error, closure and rupture and will discuss the ways in which Romance uses strategies of containment to obviate disruptive, imperfect, or immoral readings. (Guynn)
Literary Anthropology.
"Enthography's traditional vocation of cultural criticism (Montaigne's "On Cannibals," Montesquieu's Persian Letters) has reemerged with new explicitness and vigor" - James Clifford, Introduction, Writing Culture, p. 23. "We know that out subtlest perceptions, our highest values, are all based upon contrast; that light without darkness or beauty without ugliness would lose the qualities which they now appear to us to have. And similarly, if we would appreciate our own civilization, this elaborate pattern of life which we have made for ourselves as a people and which we are at such pains to pass on to our children, we must set our civilization over and against very different ones ... But if we step outside the stream of Indo-European culture, the appreciation which we can accord our civilization is even more enhanced." - Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, pp. 7-8. These citations - the first from a contemporary "critic" of anthropology, the second from a celebrated pioneer in ethnographic study - set the tone for the line of analysis that this course will pursue. In some sense, eighteenth-century versions of "anthropology", as Clifford indicates, inaugurated the field of ethnography. Mead makes explicit the critical thrust of ethnographic fieldwork: not to critique "other" cultures, but to shed light upon our own cultural biases. This course will explore the emergence of an anthropological literature or a literary anthropology during the eighteenth century. We will be interested in anthropology and ethnography as critical studies. Beginning with Rousseau's efforts to determine the "nature of man" by tracing the roots of civilization and culture, we will examine the critical aspect of this enterprise in relation to Enlightenment thought in general. Having established the importance of the "nature of man" for social criticism, we will move to texts that explore the interaction (fictional or otherwise) between cultures. Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, and finally, Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne will enable us to analyze the ethnographic contributions of the eighteenth century. (Simon)
Study/Criticism.
