French Faculty

Enseignant·e·s

Dominique Butler-BorruatTeaching Professor of FrenchSylvie Carduner Collegiate LecturerDirector, RC French ProgramIntensive French II CoordinatorContact me:dborruat@umich.edu

Dominique Butler-Borruat has been teaching for more than thirty years in the Residential College where she has been the Head of the French program since 2006. She is also the coordinator for Intensive French II. An early adopter of learning technologies, she integrated many of them into her courses to enhance her teaching; for example, she implemented flipped class pedagogy in her language courses, and for many years now, has been using a conversational platform that gives her students the opportunity to not only communicate with French speakers from around the world, but also to expand their cross-cultural understanding. Her seminar courses draw upon various fields such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology and women studies. She has also developed a service-learning course to offer advanced students in her program a unique way to apply their language skills in the community. For more than ten years, the experiential component of this course has partnered with Freedom House Detroit, a non-profit organization offering shelter and services, including legal assistance, to victims of persecution seeking asylum in the United States. In her classes, she strives to foster an inclusive and supportive learning environment that encourages students to feel confident in stepping outside their comfort zones in order to develop their full potential.

Course Titles [Seminars]

· Existentialism: The Human Condition and The Absurd

· « Au coeur de l‘amitié » : A Multidisciplinary Study of the Concept Friendship

· « Un homme sur deux est une femme. » Are We There Yet? The Status of Women in Francophonie.

Elissa Bell Bayraktar, Ph.D. is a Lecturer IV in the Residential College. She teaches in, and currently directs, the Arts & Ideas in the Humanities program. She also teaches in the RC's Intensive French program. She did her graduate work in French literature (18th-20th centuries) at Princeton University. She has designed and taught a variety of modern literature and culture courses for the RC: some have been organized around a particular genre (poetry, modern short story) while others have covered such topics as boredom, les Éditions de Minuit, technology, and the role of art and the artist in everyday life. Her current research projects center on Samuel Beckett’s self-translations and on Francis Ponge’s Le Parti pris des choses. Her book project is on Beckett’s short prose in French.

Dr. Elissa BayraktarLecturer IVDirector, Arts and Ideas in The HumanitiesIntensive French I CoordinatorContact me:ebayrakt@umich.edu

Mark Burde has a B.A. in history from Yale and a PhD in French Literature with a medieval specialization from Washington University in St. Louis. He has published on medieval literature and culture, often with a focus on parody and satire, and is currently working on a translation project of Old French verse to English verse. His interests encompass literature, social history, history of religion, history of language and sociolinguistics. He teaches in the French Intensive Language program, the First Year Seminar program and the Arts and Ideas program.

Dr. Mark BurdeLecturer IIRC FrenchFirst-Year SeminarArts and Ideas in The HumanitiesContact me:mburde@umich.edu

In September 2019, Dr. Louise-Hélène Filion joined the Residential College as a Lecturer in the French program. Louise-Hélène received her B.A. in French Studies (2008) and M.A. in French-Language Literature (2010) degrees from the Université de Montréal, which included one year studying abroad at the Université Paris VII-Denis-Diderot (2007-2008). She graduated summa cum laude from a PhD program in literary studies convened jointly by the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Universität des Saarlandes, receiving both Canadian and German qualifications. Subsequently, Louise-Hélène was a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Universität des Saarlandes (2017-2018) and a Québec government-sponsored postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan from 2018-2022.

Louise-Hélène is a specialist in Québec literature and culture and an adept generalist, having taught French as a second language at all levels, as well as courses on Francophone literatures since 2013, including a course on "Migrant Writing in Québec" offered as a post-proficiency Readings Course at the Residential College. She also maintains an active German Studies research agenda and offers a course on “German Graphic Literature and Migration” in the RC German program.

Her special research interest is in intercultural approaches to modern and contemporary Québec literature and culture, including imagology, theories of cross-cultural communication and of cross-cultural intertextuality, theories of cultural transfer, and reception studies. She has done extensive research on perceptions of Germany in Québec Literature and Culture, which led to the publication of her first monograph in 2021 by Éditions Nota bene in Montreal: Les usages littéraires de Thomas Bernhard et de Peter Handke au Québec: Les modalités d’une affiliation interculturelle. Findings from her research on contemporary intercultural literature from Québec and Germany have been published in French, English, and German in peer-reviewed journals such as: Littératures; Voix et Images; Eurostudia; Zeitschrift für Kanada Studien; and Seminar. They have also appeared in German collections, such as Klassik als kulturelle Praxis: Funktional, intermedial, transkulturell (De Gruyter, 2019).

Dr. Louise-Hélène FilionLecturer IIRC French RC GermanArts and Ideas in the HumanitiesArts $ IdeasContact me:lofilion@umich.edu

Hala DikaIntermittent LecturerContact me:haldi@umich.edu

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