Rachel Mesch is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University. She is the author of three interdisciplinary works on gender in nineteenth-century France, The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (2006); Having it All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman (2013); and Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (2020), which was a finalist for the American Library in Paris annual book prize. Her new project asks what a trans studies approach can teach us about the relationship between gender, empire, and mass culture in nineteenth-century France. She has been co-hosting the “NCFS Unbound” book series since 2020, featuring conversations around new books in Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

Lloyd Kramer is a Professor Emeritus of History and the former Director of Carolina Public Humanities (CPH) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His historical work emphasizes the importance of cross-cultural experiences and transnational exchanges. His most recent book, Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood, was published in 2024 by the University of North Carolina Press. Kramer’s earlier historical publications include Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830-1848 (Cornell University Press, 1988); and Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (UNC Press, 1996). He believes that historical knowledge and the humanities are essential for a flourishing democratic society.

Fred Csibi-Levin is a scientist turned pastry chef. After a decade in the pharmaceutical industry, he worked as an executive pastry chef at different culinary establishments in Boston. Csibi-Levin recently published his first book, Mastering Macarons, and is currently a chef instructor at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. He aims to make baking accessible to everyone by cultivating an understanding of the science involved. His work has been featured in the Pastry Arts Magazine, Tastemade, and Buzzfeed. He has also competed on the Food Network.

Elaine Sciolino, former New York Times Paris bureau chief and bestselling author, will discuss her latest book, Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum (W. W. Norton, 2025). 

In Adventures in the Louvre, Sciolino shows how anyone can forge an intimate connection with the museum and be transformed by its seductive power. Blending journalism, travelogue, history, and memoir, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, the largest and most famous museum in the world. She shares stories and secrets about her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and takes readers into the museum’s gardens, basements, corridors, and onto its rooftops.

Elaine Sciolino is the author of five books, including the bestsellers The Only Street in Paris (2015) and The Seine (2019). In 2010, she received the Legion of Honor, the highest distinction of the French state. Sciolino has taught as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University’s Council of the Humanities and, in 2019, she joined the Executive Committee of Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based international advocacy organization promoting freedom of information and freedom of the press.

Starting at 4pm in Collins Cinema, Prof. Sara Kippur will moderate a student-alumnae panel featuring current and former Wellesley students who have interned with Sciolino in recent years. Panelists will discuss working with Sciolino and share insights into how their research and fact-checking experiences deepened their understanding of literary journalism. 

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is the Dean’s Professor of Culture and Social Justice as well as Director of Africana Studies at Northeastern University. A Black feminist literary scholar, she works at the intersections of race, gender and justice from a global perspective. She is the author of three books: Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014), The Trumpet of Conscience Today (2021), and Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022). Dr. Jean-Charles is currently at work on two book projects—The Rape Culture Syllabus, under contract with Columbia University Press, and Tifi at the Center: Holding Haitian Girlhood.

Sarah Fishman, Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston, specializes in twentieth-century French history with an emphasis on gender and society.  She has published two books exploring the social impact of World War II in France, We Will Wait about POW wives, and The Battle for Children about delinquent youth and juvenile justice during the war. Following women, families and children into the postwar, she published From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution in 2017. Currently she is completing a new book, Bridges to Feminism: Marcelle Auclair, Marcelle Ségal, and Women’s Magazines in Twentieth-Century France. Her talk will explore changing ideas about women, men, and family after World War II in France, not looking back from the present but starting with the wartime Vichy years and moving forward.

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French, Zaffaroni Family Chair in Undergraduate Education, and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at UC Berkeley, as well as co-Principal Investigator of “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times” (Mellon, 2024-2027). Her books include The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), and Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe's Edges (forthcoming with Fordham), which was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Rhiannon Welch is Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature and Associate Professor of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. Her first book, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics (Liverpool UP, 2016) demonstrated how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture, rather than a fascist aberration or a contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration. Her second book manuscript, Reverberation and the Anticolonial Imagination is currently under review by Stanford University Press.

Nicolas Danila (MSc, MBA, PhD) a une formation multidisciplinaire en sciences (mathématiques, sciences physiques et chimie) management (économie et stratégie) et arts (peinture, poterie, poésie et histoire de l’art). Il travaille dans l’industrie de la parfumerie de luxe et il est l’auteur de plusieurs innovations stratégiques, dont la création d’une nouvelle famille de parfums, les Fragranceuticals.

Sa conférence présente une vue d’ensemble de la parfumerie française, son histoire, différentes familles de parfums, les principales étapes (l’idée, la formulation, les ingrédients, les allergènes, l’évaluation, le conditionnement, …) suivie par le secret de la création des Fragranceuticals. Après la conférence les membres de l’auditoire peuvent participer à un petit concours pour gagner des exemplaires de ces uniques parfums.

Laure Katsaros is G. Armour Craig Professor in Language and Literature in the department of French at Amherst College. She is the author of two books, Un nouveau monde amoureux : Célibataires et prostituées au dix-neuvième siècle (2010) and New York-Paris: Whitman, Baudelaire and the Hybrid City (2011). She is currently at work on a book manuscript on the fascination with ancient Egyptian civilization and history in nineteenth-century French literature and material culture.

“There are three things that delight me: gold, marble and purple.” These words, spoken by a character in the gender-bending historical novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, are a thinly disguised self-portrait of the author, the Romantic aesthete Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). Obsessed with the material culture of pre-modern societies, Gautier indulged in his passion for “gold, marble and purple” in his serialized novel Le Roman de la momie (1857), which takes place in ancient Thebes (Waset for the ancient Egyptians). Professor Laure Katsaros's presentation connects the richly detailed descriptions of Egypt in Le Roman de la momie with the emergence of photography as a new medium of artistic expression in the mid-nineteenth century.

Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at NYU. She is the author of Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2015; Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Literature; MSA Prize for a First Book) and Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Columbia University Press, 2023).

Roberta Antognini is originally from Canton Ticino in Switzerland. She is Associate Professor Emerita of Italian Studies at Vassar College. She is the author of a monograph on Petrarch’s letters, Il progetto autobiografico delle Familiares di Petrarca (2008), and co-editor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (2012). With Deborah Woodard, she has translated into English Amelia Rosselli’s collections, Hospital Series (2015), Obtuse Diary (2018), The Dragonfly (2023), Notes Scattered and Lost (forthcoming 2024), and Document (forthcoming 2025).

Rebecca Wilkin is Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University (Tacoma, WA), where she also teaches in the First Year Experience Program, in the International Honors Program, and in Global Studies. She is a specialist of Descartes and Cartesianism, as well as of women philosophers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. She translated Gabrielle Suchon with Wellesley alumna Domna Stanton and reconstructed and translated Louise Dupin’s Work on Women for Oxford University Press (2023) with Angela Hunter.

Louise Roussel joined KeyBank’s Boston Middle Market Banking team in 2021. KeyBank, headquartered in Cleveland, OH, is one of the nation’s largest regional banks, with over $188BN in assets. Louise is focused on generating new and deepening existing client relationships with middle market businesses throughout the New England area. Louise has over 18 years of experience in Banking and Capital Markets, working in the end-to-end loan origination cycle, including structuring, underwriting, syndication and execution of loan transactions. Previously, she was a Director of Capital Markets at G2 Capital Advisors (“G2”), a Boston-based boutique investment bank and a Director in the Loan Capital Markets - Syndications Group at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (“SMBC”) in NYC. Before SMBC, Louise spent 10 years at BNP Paribas in NYC where she held various roles in the Loan Capital Markets, Corporate Investment Banking and Restructuring groups. Louise is a Board member of FACCNE and Chair of FACC’Fin, the Finance forum of the Chamber.

Karen Pevenstein is a strategic communications leader with more than 20 years of experience in public relations, brand marketing and broadcast journalism. She is also the founder of Louis Sel, the exclusive US distributor of specialty sea salt imported from Brittany, France. Her consulting practice specializes in building communications/brand strategies and thought leadership platforms for B2B and B2C clients working across organizations and closely supporting C-suite leadership. A master storyteller spanning multiple industries including financial services, tech and lifestyle, she has a proven track record of elevating brands and reputations in Fortune 100 and startup settings. Karen translated her passion for food and French culture to create her business, Louis Sel, which has been featured in the Boston Globe and Forbes. She is the 2019 winner of FACCNE’s FAB Awards for Women in Business. A Boston resident and member of FACCNE since 2018, Karen is currently co-chair of FACCNE’s Women in Business Network.

Nicole Ferry-Lacchia is a strategic and financial advisor at Winterberry Capital Advisors and a senior Capital Markets instructor at Wall Street Prep. She previously spent 10 years at Goldman Sachs in NY in Corporate Lending & Debt Capital Markets, Fixed Income Sales and Risk Management leading global cross-functional and cross-divisional teams in complex debt financing transactions for Fortune 100 and financial sponsor clients. Nicole began her career at Deloitte in NY, Paris, Geneva and Boston as an auditor and financial consultant specializing in restructuring and financial advisory services. Passionate about supporting women’s advancement in finance, Nicole served on the leadership committee for Goldman Sachs’ Women’s Network, as a board member of the Chicago Booth Women’s Network and is a member of 100 Women in Finance.

Masha Belenky est professeure de littérature française à l'Université George Washington. Ses thèmes de recherche et d'enseignement comprennent la culture populaire française du XIXe siècle, l'histoire culturelle et les études urbaines. Parmi ses publications principales, on compte deux livres, The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (Bucknell, 2008) et Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester UP, 2019), ce dernier examinant la relation entre les premiers transports en commun et la culture populaire et la manière dont ils ont contribué au concept de modernité en France. Elle a également co-édité et co-traduit une anthologie de la littérature populaire française du XIXe siècle (publiée dans la série MLA Text and Translation) et plusieurs numéros de revues.

Christina Carroll is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kalamazoo College. Her work focuses on the history of nineteenth-century France and its colonial empire, especially in Algeria; she also has interests in memory, intellectual history, and political culture. Her first book, The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850-1900, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022. Her current project, "Transportation, Exile, and Colonial Politics in France and Algeria, 1848-1880," looks at the intersection between transportation aimed at removing political dissidents from metropolitan France and transportation intended to control political dissent among indigenous communities in French colonial Algeria.

Anne Duprat est professeure de littérature comparée à l'Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, spécialiste de théorie de la fiction contemporaine et des littératures européennes des XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Essayiste et traductrice, elle est l'auteur de Vraisemblances. Poétiques de la fiction en France et en Italie (Champion, 2009), de Fiction et cultures (avec F. Lavocat, 2010), Histoires et savoirs. Anecdotes scientifiques aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (avec F. Aït-Touati, Peter Land, 2012), et Romanesques Noirs 1750-1850 (avec M. Hersant et L. Ruiz, Garnier, 2019). Elle a récemment publié Histoire du captif. Un paradigme littéraire, de l'Antiquité au XVIIe siècle (Droz, 2023) ainsi qu'une traduction de Cervantès (Cervantès, Théâtre barbaresque, avec A. Teulade et F. Madelpuech, Garnier Classiques, "Littératures étrangères," 2022).

Stéphane Gerson est Professeur d'histoire et d'études françaises à la New York University, dont il a dirigé l'Institut d'études françaises (Institute of French Studies) entre 2017 et 2021. Ses travaux portent sur la mémoire et l'oubli, les échelles territoriales, l'écriture de l'histoire et les histoires de famille. Il a deux livres en préparation: un collectif Scholars and Their Kin: Experiments in Historical Writing (University of Chicago Press, 2024) et Les gestes de notre guerre: 1994-1942 (Éditions La Découverte, 2026). Parmi ses autres ouvrages: Disaster Falls (Crown 2017; trad. Alma 2020); Pourquoi la France? Des historiens américains racontent leur passion pour l'Hexagone, dir. avec Laura Lee Downs (Cornell, 2006; trad. Éditions du Seuil, 2007). 

Serena Bassi is assistant professor in Italian Studies at Yale University. Their current book project titled Mistranslations: Queer Marxism in Italy after 1968 is the first study to date of the 1970s Italian Gay Liberation Movement - its history, its politics, and its aesthetics. Serena's interests are in modern and contemporary Italian cultural studies, translation studies and queer studies.

Louisa Mackenzie grew up in Scotland, did graduate work in Berkeley, CA, and is Associate Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. They have published and taught on early modern and contemporary French culture, ecocriticism, Animal Studies, and gender studies. Their co-edited volume Devenir non-binaire en français contemporain was published last year in Paris and is receiving positive press.

Guillemette Faure est journaliste et chroniqueuse pour Le Monde. Elle est l'autrice de dix livres (dont Dîners en ville, mode d'emploi, Grasset et Ça peut toujours servir, Stock et Pourquoi les enfants de profs réussissent mieux, Les Arènes) de deux documentaires (Gauche caviar, ton univers impitoyable et Les Présidents et les femmes) et de deux livres pour enfant (Consommation: le guide de l'anti-manipulation et Dys et célèbres, tous deux publiés chez Casterman). 

Marina Chiche is an internationally recognized solo and chamber violinist. She has performed with many orchestras: Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre National de Lille, Orchestre National de Bretagne, Sinfonia Varsovia, and the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa, among others. Her album Post-Scriptum (2020) was met with critical acclaim. With her book, Musiciennes de légende, her articles, and radio programs, she strives to make classical music accessible to all. Distinguished among the "100 Women of Culture" in 2022 and named an ambassador of the French Touch  movement, Marina Chiche is among the most important figures in French music today who makes culture shine beyond borders. 

Michèle Bacholle est Professeure-chercheuse en Études Françaises. Sa recherche porte principalement sur les écrivaines contemporaines, en particulier Annie Ernaux et Linda Lê sur qui elle a publié maints articles et deux livres, dont Annie Ernaux de la perte au corps glorieux (Presses Universitaires de Rennes 2011). Son e-musée Annie Ernaux (2021-2022) était le premier dédié à un.e écrivain.e français.e.