Greetings and welcome to the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies!

As Chair, I have the privilege of overseeing exciting undergraduate and graduate programs committed to all fields of French and Francophone Studies. We have a dynamic program, and our faculty are passionate scholars who maintain high standards in their research and teaching. I encourage you to explore our web-pages and to discover the broad range of research and teaching interests we have, as well as the innovative dissertations our graduate students are currently working on.

Our department has a long tradition of promoting interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches to French and Francophone Studies. We emphasize the global aspects of these traditions, and encourage our students to discover a long, rich, and varied heritage. In our courses, we stress both the importance of the French language, wherever it is spoken, and the richness of French and Francophone traditions from the Middle Ages to the present, from France to Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and beyond. To the linguistic and historical view of the discipline, we add expertise in French cinema and cultural studies.

Our activities at UCLA foster interdisciplinary exchanges in the Humanities and Social Sciences and we regularly organize conferences and symposia, and invite distinguished scholars and writers to campus. More recently, we have started a new program - “On Set with French Cinema” - that brings several filmmakers each year to UCLA for workshops and seminars. All of our events are free and open to the public and we endeavor to attract a broad cross section of the population of Los Angeles. We are also involved in Outreach Programs for pupils and secondary school teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and are committed to building stronger constituencies with our language partners throughout California.

French and Francophone thinkers have made crucial contributions to the study of the humanities, to the re-thinking of historiography and anthropology, and to the theoretical frameworks that underlie cultural and postcolonial studies. Our course offerings take these developments into account and we are proud of the strengths of our undergraduate and graduate programs.

We invite interested students to explore the possibilities offered at UCLA for both undergraduate and graduate studies, and to contact our faculty and staff for further information.