Erika Josephson (BAJ/BA French 1996) is Executive Producer of "NBC News Now" with Kate Snow and Zinhle Essamuah. The program airs on all NBC stations around the U.S. from 2-4 pm Eastern Monday-Friday, and streams daily on NBC News Now. She, her husband and daughter live in New York City.

Fast-forward fifteen months, and Julia and Josh are married and raising their baby in small-town Indiana. But with haters around every corner, Julia’s life is a far cry from the domestic bliss she imagined. Then her splintering world shatters: Josh goes missing, and she becomes the prime suspect in his murder.

With no one left she can trust, Julia takes the investigation into her own hands. But the explosive truths she uncovers will drive her to her breaking point—and isn’t that where a person’s true nature is revealed? That is…if Julia truly is a person. 

Her 1st book with Penguin Random House UK will be out summer 2025 (BEACH BODIES), and 2nd book with HarperCollins (and 3rd book overall), THE NEW YEAR'S PARTY, will be out October 2025. She truly enjoyed, after studying English and French literature at IU, to get to add her voice to the literary landscape she spent so many years studying. In addition, she became a literary agent this year.

Laird Hunt (BA French and History 1990) is a professor of Literary Arts at Brown University and a recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction. His ninth novel, ZORRIE (a 2021 finalist for the National Book Award which is set in Indiana), was published in France in January by Éditions Globe to major reviews and interviews in Le Monde, L'Humanité, Le Figaro, France Culture and Europe 1 among others.

Edward M. Bowen III (PhD 2015), Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Kansas, recently co-edited a volume with Damien Pollard, titled Film Exhibition: The Italian Context, that will be published by Legenda Press of the Modern Humanities Research Association in Summer 2024. 

Melanie Muessig Enkoff (class of 1981) is enjoying her 4th year of retirement after 39 years of teaching French in Indiana: 3 years at Shoals High School and 36 for Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation in Columbus, Indiana.

Bryan Enkoff (MA 1988) is enjoying his 5th year of retirement after teaching health and P.E. for 36 years for Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation in Columbus, Indiana.

Warren Brodine (BA French and Germanic Studies 1990) works as a principal in a national health care consulting company and recently relocated to Rancho Mirage, CA with his husband, Mark Rhein (Missouri 1988). He is fortunate to get to visit Bloomington twice a year as a member of the Singing Hoosiers Alumni Council. He hopes current and prospective students see language study as a great foundation for any career.

Anne Lutkus shares that her travels to France are virtual now but she keeps up a lot of connections. Rochester is twinned with Rennes, France, so she has gotten to know that lovely western territory. The University of Rochester has long had student exchanges with a Rennes university. She has taken lots of students on a UR summer study program there, and citizen groups exchange visits regularly. She also shares that Kay Cushman Montagne, who did her PhD at IU in the late 60s, is now in a nursing home in southwestern France and has lived in France for decades.

Carmel Owen (Mary Carmel) (BA French and Art History 1970) is an American writer living in NYC since her graduation but with ties to France. Her musical A MIRRORED MONET (www.amirroredmonet.com) was produced and premiered at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe music festival. It is about Claude Monet during WW1 and premiered to great reviews and audiences; it may go to London next. It has a Scottish cast.

David Koon (BA French and Spanish 1979) went on to get an MBA and a Masters in IT. He worked for 35 years in IT and retired in 2019. He and his family moved to Oregon from New Mexico in 1992 and have been there ever since. His time is taken up with travel, sailing, and doing things with friends and family.

Julia Swan (BA French and Italian 2005/MA French Linguistics 2006) earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2016. She is now an Associate Professor at San José State University where she teaches courses in sociolinguistics and multilingualism. As one recent accomplishment, she has a chapter in press in the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes edited by Kingsley Bolton on the relationship of Canadian English and US English. She still draws on many of the concepts and pedagogical tools she learned in her time at IU as a student and as an Associate Instructor. While her university teaching is primarily in English, she is raising a bilingual son and has spoken French to him since he was born. He attends the French American School of Silicon Valley where he is completing the French national curriculum. Among other things, her training in French grammar, history, and culture from instructors like Jacques Merceron, Michael Berkvam, Kevin Rottet, Laurent Dekydspotter, Barbara Vance, Rosemary Lloyd and Julie Auger has helped her to support her son's education. She thinks of them often and of things she learned in their courses. She also owes a great deal to the Indiana Honors Program in Foreign Languages for High School Students, which afforded her a life-changing immersion opportunity at age 16. Her parents still reside in Bloomington, so she typically makes trips once or twice a year. She would love to connect with FRIT faculty or alumni on some occasion!

Suzanne Boeldt Kriscunas (MA 1977/MBA 1981) retired in April after nearly 23 years as an investment partner and fund manager at the global private equity firm, The Riverside Company. Now, as a member of the Board of Trustees at Denison University and a member of the Executive Dean’s Advisory Board for the IU College of Arts & Sciences, she remains engaged with the challenges and opportunities facing higher ed today. She is also pleased to serve on the boards of Chef Works, Inc. and NuStef Baking, Ltd. She and her husband enjoy splitting their time between Dallas and Colorado and traveling to France as often as possible.

Dorothy Stegman retired from Ball State University, where she had taught since 2003, at the end of the Spring 2024 semester. Before coming to Ball State, she taught at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez for 10 years and at Butler University for 2 years. She shares that on April 10, the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at Ball State was honored to host Dr. Aiko Okamoto-MacPhail to give the 2024 talk for the Stegman Speaker Series. It was entitled "Between Name and Object: Cross-Cultural Exchange, Poetics, and Philosophy."

Anthony Nussmeier (PhD Italian 2012) is Associate Professor of Italian and Director of Italian at the University of Dallas. He was recently appointed Chair of the Department of Modern Languages. In January 2024 he was the recipient of the Haggar Fellow Award, given annually to one junior faculty member at the University of Dallas for “significant contributions to the university through scholarly work, excellence in teaching, and exemplary collegiality.” He continues to be active in the fields of Medieval, Italian, and Dante Studies, publishing and serving as Contributing Editor (Dante Studies) for The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies, as Co-Editor and English-Language Book Review Editor for Annali d’Italianistica, as Founding Board Member for the multimedia project 100 Days of Dante, and on the National Screening Committee for Fulbright Teaching Assistantships in Italy. In 2023, he was also one of three co-organizers responsible for founding the Dallas-Fort Worth Italian Festival, a now-annual event that welcomed more than 3,000 attendees in its first year.

Alyssa Johnson (class of 2001) has a consulting company that works with individuals and organizations on topics related to emotional intelligence, the neuroscience of productivity, and racialized trauma. The underpinning of Alyssa's work is trauma and how it impacts our productivity. Alyssa also does extensive work with White people on addressing our racialized trauma. Our trauma prevents us from having meaningful race conversations and taking the necessary steps to dismantle White supremacy.

William C. Carter (PhD French 1971) was pleased to learn from an editor at Yale University Press that The New York Times has compiled a list of the “best books” written between 2000 and 2023 and that his biography of Proust was one of the books selected.

Richard Ritz (BA/MAT French 1968) would like to share the following with our alumni:

Dear Alumni,

I am a 1968 graduate of IU Bloomington, with an AB in French (minor in Spanish) and a MAT in French (minor in Spanish).  I taught French and Spanish at Bloomington North for 30-plus years (department chair for several years), retired from MCCSC in 2002, and then worked for Solution Tree Publishers as a Spanish translator/presenter.  I then accepted a job at Cathedral High School, commuted to Indianapolis, and taught Spanish for a year.

My wife Lila and I moved to Winter Haven, Florida in 2006 and I taught Spanish and AP World History for 10 years at Summerlin Military Academy in Bartow, Florida until retiring in 2016.  My career spanned 47 years and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  I taught many sons and daughters of IU professors and students. I had the crème de la crème, so to speak, and worked them hard.  We had several national winners in the AATF national French contest and I was president of the Indiana chapter of AATF for a year.

I took students on 10 exchanges to France.  We also had students go to Saint-Brieuc in the summer with the IU program and others who independently followed up their North studies with study and work in France and Europe.  Our French graduates include Terry Stotts, who played professional basketball in France and is the former coach of the Portland Trailblazers of the NBA, fourth runner-up Miss America, Tiffany Storm, Dan Kaganovich, vice-president of Neurobiology at Wave Break Therapeutics who has the eponymous Kaganovich Lab at Southhampton University, several music school prodigies, Hollywood writers and actors, lawyers, and doctors, to name but a few.  I have unintentionally left out some very successful graduates because there were too many to name. I was blessed to have had wonderful and serious students everywhere I taught. It made life so enjoyable and I could not have chosen a better profession.

I will close with this anecdote. In 1965 I was counseled by the legendary IU French professor, Dr.Francis Gravit, who asked me if I wanted to be a French major. I answered, "I think so.” He responded with, “That's not a good attitude.” I was unsure at the time what profession I wanted to choose but the choice I made to major in French changed my life forever and gave me memories and satisfaction that will last until Jesus calls me home.

I would like to thank all of my professors and I will not name them for fear of leaving someone out but would especially like to thank Professor Roy Leake for his unwavering confidence in my teaching, and support through the years. His son, David, was one of the stars of my French classes.

Gratefully submitted,
Richard Ritz (class of 1968)