French Program News

The association of Francophone consulates and the Francophone delegations to the United Nations awarded the Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in French the 2008 Venet d'or. This award honors an American individual or institution that promotes francophonie and its values—solidarity, cultural diversity and multilingualism—in the United States.
The award was presented at the Grande Soirée de la Francophonie held at the Graduate Center on March 17, 2008. Edouard Glissant, Distinguished Professor, and Francesca Canadé Sautman, Professor of French and Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in French, accepted the prize on behalf of CUNY’s Graduate Center. For more information on the award as well as the Grande Soirée de la Francophonie, please click here.
On December 9-15, in Cayenne, French Guiana, Distinguished Professor Edouard Glissant presided over the awarding of this year's Prix Carbet at an international colloquium sponsored by the Conseil Régional de l’île de France, the Ministère de l’Outre-Mer, and the Institut du Tout-Monde. At this event he read his latest work, Quand les murs tombent, l’identité nationale hors-la-loi ? For more information on the award and this event, click here.
The National Poetry Series announced that Professor Marilyn Hacker has been awarded the 2007 Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Professor Hacker’s project, King of a Hundred Horsemen, is a translation of French poet Marie Etienne, and will be published in 2008 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Poet Robert Hass served as judge for this year’s award. To view the translation online, click here.
The PhD Program in French recently held a symposium in honor of the late Alex Szogyi, entitled Rich Stews: Reading Food and Culture.
Alex Szogyi, professor of many years at CUNY, was a widely known 17th-century scholar, specializing in the theater of Racine and the work of La Fontaine, as well as a translator, food critic and historian and a talented concert pianist. Among his many accomplishments, Professor Szogyi edited a volume on the history and representation of chocolate: Chocolate: Food of the Gods (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997).
To read his obituaries, please visit the New York Times and The Villager.
For the centenary celebration of the birth of the René Char (1907-1988), Distinguished Professor Mary Ann Caws has organized a roundtable which is being hosted by the Maison Française at NYU, on Thursday October 11th. Roundtable participants include Sandra Bermann (Princeton University), Nancy Piore, (Barnard), and Michael Wood, (Princeton University). Distinguished Professor Caws will moderate the roundtable.
The éditions Galaade and l’Institut du Tout-Monde held an event on the occasion of the publication of Quand les murs tombent: l'identité nationale hors-la-loi? by Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. The event, which took place on October 6th in Paris, included a lecture by Marianne Basler, Nicole Dogué and Greg Germain. Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwy Plenel and Patrick Saurin moderated the discussion.
The Institut du Tout-monde was recently founded in Paris and Martinique at the initiative of Distinguished Professor Edouard Glissant. Please click here to visit the Institute's website.
As producer of Canapé, Professor Jerry Carlson has been nominated for an Emmy award in the category of Arts Programming. This is his third nomination.
Since 1996, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and CUNY TV have produced together one of the few French programs to appear on American television: Canapé.
Stylish and modern, Canapé is the only program entirely devoted to French cultural events in New York and the United States. This monthly half-hour show includes film releases, book translations, exhibitions, festivals, ballets, concerts and theater productions.The series premieres on CUNY TV in New York and is distributed nationally to PBS affiliates, media centers, and educational networks.
The Modern Language Association of America awarded its fourteenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Evelyne Ender, professor of French at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, for her book Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography, published by the University of Michigan Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.
The program is pleased to announce its participation in the TANDEM language learning program, at the Université de Lausanne, Suisse.
For more information about the program, please click here.
To visit the Université de Lausanne's website, http://www.unil.ch.