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French Graduate Students


Thomas D'Amato

Thomas D’Amato

Thomas D’Amato studied in Paris at the Lycée Henri IV and the Sorbonne, where he earned his MA in French Literatures, working on topics of interest to gender studies, such as the hysteria in medieval literature or the figure of the seducer in several novels of the interwar period. After passing the CAPES and the Agrégation exams in 2018, Thomas became a “professeur agrégé de Lettres modernes” in several high schools in Île-de-France. At Hopkins, he would like to develop an interdisciplinary approach to several postwar authors to study how some of them tried to think about the relationship of human beings to their environment beyond the traditional distinction between subject and object. His current areas of interest for this project are ecocriticism, philosophy, and art history.


Julia Jacob

Julia Jacob

Julia Jacob earned an M.A. in Geography at the University of Nantes, France, in 2011 with a thesis centered around space perception and the discovery of America. To do that, she studied diaries written by travelers from the 16th-century. She also earned an M.A. in Literature in 2012, with a thesis on cruelty in theater, in France, during the mythological revival that occurred between the two World Wars. She then obtained a teaching license (Capes) and was a teacher for several years. In parallel, she also worked on transcribing and computing early 18th-century registers of the Comédie-Italienne for the Cethefi (University of Nantes). Now, she primarily studies everything related to geography and space in science fiction, from the early productions by Jules Verne to the most recent Cyberpunk and retro-futuristic fictions. Specifically, her thesis focuses on worldbuilding in Steampunk fiction in the Anglophone, Francophone, and Japanese areas. Nevertheless, she is always happy to also dive into another research subject, whether it is in 18th-century studies or computer science.


Jean-Ederson Jean-Pierre

Jean-Ederson Jean-Pierre

Jean-Ederson Jean-Pierre received his MA in French and Francophone studies from Syracuse University after completing a BA in Sociology at the State University of Haiti. Jean-Ederson taught French language during four semesters as part of his Teaching Assistant duties at Syracuse University, where he was honored both as Outstanding MA student in French and Outstanding Teaching Assistant. His research interests include, but are not limited to, the relationship between literature and society with a focus on the Francophone Caribbean literature.


KSAS

Clara Kheyrkhah

Clara Kheyrkhah is a fourth-year PhD student in the Modern Languages and Literatures department at the Johns Hopkins University. She earned her BA in French with a minor in English literature from McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her honors thesis examined the writing of exile in Assia Djebar’s L’amour, La fantasia. At Hopkins, she works on contemporary French literature and medical humanities, with a particular focus on the concept of immunity and body theory.


Annie Lulu

Annie Lulu

Annie Lulu

is a PhD student in the French Program at Johns Hopkins’ Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. She graduated in Philosophy at the Sorbonne and earned two certificates in Criminal and Criminological Sciences at Paris Pantheon-Assas university. Her research interests reflect her singular cultural upbringing between an African and an Eastern European background, embracing French and francophone modernity’s avant-garde transcultural poets and novelists, from the Congolese post-colonial poetry and fiction works of Tchicaya U’Tamsi and Sony Labou Tansi, to the works of Benjamin Fondane and the interwar French writing poets of the Romanian Jewish artistic exile in Paris, as well as the rare Romani francophone literary productions, in particular the works of the sole 20th century French Roma novelist, Mattéo Maximoff.

A multi-awarded francophone creative writer, her first novel, “La Mer Noire dans les Grands Lacs” received the Senghor Prize, the Alain-Fournier prize, the first edition of the Cocteau literary prize, and was a finalist to several francophone awards such as the Grand Prix du Roman Métis or the Ahmadou Kourouma Prize of the International African Geneva Bookfair. She received the Prix du Roman d’Écologie 2023 for her second novel, “Peine des Faunes”. Along with novels and essays, she regularly writes for poetry reviews and contemporary art books, such as “Recaptioning Congo”, a collective exhibition catalog (New York Times Best Art Books of 2022).


Wanyun Luo

Wanyun Luo

Wanyun Luo holds an M.A. in French Language and Literature at Peking University, with a thesis regarding the representation of faces in Jean Cocteau’s works. In 2016-2017, she was a visiting student at SciencesPo Paris and in 2020, at L’École normale supérieure de Lyon. Her research is centered on the history, representation and philosophy of the face, and the ways in which words, images and sounds participate in the perception and memory of human faces. Wanyun’s longtime interest in visual arts has triggered her reading of modern and contemporary French writers who write about arts, and later, her investigation on the procedures of the writing of the art history. Wanyun is also a dedicated multi-lingual translator (French, English, Chinese) in contemporary literature and theatre. 


KSAS

Julianne Mehra

Julianne Mehra graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2021 with a BA in Comparative Literature and a thesis exploring musical and literary aesthetics in eighteenth-century France. Her research interests include the literature of the French Enlightenment, the intersections between music, science, and literature, and the eighteenth-century conception of genius. 


Zvezdana Ostojic

Zvezdana Ostojic

Zvezdana Ostojic received her MA in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Nice where she specialized in translating to and from English, French, and Italian. Her dissertation, entitled “Rencontres fatales : formes policières et affrontements intertextuels dans la fiction contemporaine” examines a corpus of novels published in French at the turn of the 21st century that borrowed codes and structures of crime fiction genre to stage the rewriting of canonical literary texts. She is also interested in experimental fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, Oulipian texts, and the intersection of film studies and ethics. She is the author of published and forthcoming articles on Albert Camus and Kamel Daoud, Marguerite Duras, and Roland Barthes.


Manon Pagé

Manon Pagé

Manon Pagé was initially studying English-speaking literature in France, she moved to the United States in 2016 to study and teach in a French department. In 2018 she earned her M.A. in French literature at Michigan State University with her thesis titled “L’hybridité générique à l’oeuvre dans Limonov d’Emmanuel Carrère”. At Johns Hopkins she reconciles her interests in both French and American cultures by studying how the hippie movement and the American counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s was represented, translated, and adapted in France at the time. More specifically, she concentrates on the notion of “passeur culturel”, or “cultural trader”. Her interests in youth culture and expression also make her focus on today’s media and the notion of “care” in digital environments.



KSAS

Camille Roche

Camille Roche is a PhD student in the French Program of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research interest centers on the writings of the self (journals, diaries, letters, autofiction, and other autobiographical forms) in the 20th century, specifically works produced by French authors writing in the American context. She also cultivates a strong interest in Documentary Photography (which she practices). Prior to joining JHU, she earned her MA in French Literature from Paris-IV Sorbonne (now Paris Sorbonne Lettres) and worked for several years in finance and publishing.


Julien Tribotté

Julien Tribotté

Julien Tribotté graduated in Philosophy, History of Art and Cinema at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and at the Sorbonne, where he dedicated his research to issues related to eroticism and willpower. He is a winner of several literary contests. He published poems and translations in national French papers. Author of a novel (Chronique d’un amour), he is currently finishing a translation of Langston Hughes’ first collection of poems.


Autumn Vowles

Autumn Vowles

Autumn Vowles received a dual B.A. in French and Psychology from Sonoma State University in 2010. She then served as an assistante de langue in the Nord-pas-de-Calais region in France for the 2011-12 school year. After meeting the requirements for an M.A. in French literature at Johns Hopkins, she studied for a year at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her research interests include religion and mysticism, libertinage, autobiographical writing, and women’s studies in the early modern era. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled “Saints and Sinners: Female Subjectivity in Early Modern Libertine and Mystical Literature.”