Laurence Anderson (MAT 1980) shared: “I am in mourning after reading that the Indiana State legislature has proposed cutting or merging the foreign language programs at Indiana University.  I was in elementary school when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Eisenhauer responded by investing heavily in the teaching of foreign languages and mathematics. His dream of a bilingual populace that could solve a math problem is now defunct.

I spent two of the happiest years of my life at Indiana University.  It was while studying Marie de France that I realized that what I wanted was to be a medieval craftsman.  I chose violin making because I figured it would be as close as I could get. I gratefully accepted a terminal masters then headed off to France to study violin making.

I spent my final semester at IU neglecting my studies to search for a wife.  I found her at the Lilly Library.  Samira was a far superior student to me.  She is now the chair of the Department of Communications Disorders at the University of Maryland.  When she informed me that her GREs were 150 points higher than mine, I knew I wanted her to be the mother of my children.  We recently celebrated our 43rd anniversary at Notre Dame de Chartres where the celebrant gave us a nice shout out at the beginning and the end of mass.   This year we also welcomed our 5th grandchild.

I have never abandoned French literature; it is still a source of great joy.  In preparation for the next opera season, I just finished Carmen, while Dialogues des Carmélites and Manon Lescaut are on my nightstand.”

Emily O’Brock (‘14) completed her PhD in French with distinction at New York University in 2022. Directed by Sarah Kay and funded by a Chateaubriand and a Georges Lurcy Fellowship, her dissertation examines honeybee symbolism in medieval France. Her current book project is titled, ‘If Small Things Can Be Compared to Great’: the Symbolic Ecology of the Honeybee in Medieval France. Since graduating, Emily has taught at NYU and Calvin University. This summer she started a new position at the University of Chicago as the Romance Languages and Literatures Librarian.

Christopher Callahan, Ph.D. French Linguistics 1985, is Professor of French Emeritus at Illinois Wesleyan University. He stays busy in retirement with scholarship, music, and grandchildren, four of whom live in Québec. In 2018, he co-taught an NEH Summer Seminar on the Trouvères with IWU colleague William Hudson, a Jacobs SoM graduate, and has recently completed two collaborative book projects: a critical edition/translation, with musicologist Gaël Saint-Cricq, of the Turin motet manuscript, Torino, Biblioteca Reale, I-Tr Vari 42, to appear with Libreria Musicale Italian; and a monograph, Les métamorphoses du chansonnier. Du livre médiéval au chanteur moderne, with musicologists Florence Mouchet and John Haines, to be published by Éditions Loubatières in Toulouse. He and his wife Madeleine will celebrate 49 years of marriage this August.

Over the 2024-2025 academic year, Lucia Casiraghi worked as an instructor of Italian and Spanish at Harvard University, and she has recently started a new position as Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Rochester. She is very grateful for the foundation and experience she gained during her time with FRIT, which continues to shape her teaching and academic path, and adds: “I am confident that future students will continue to find exceptional opportunities for growth, learning, and discovery within the department’s programs.”

Sara Dallavalle (PhD, Italian, 2020) and Leonardo Cabrini (PhD, Italian, 2023) are both Assistant Instructional Professors of Italian at the University of Chicago—Sara since 2020 and Leonardo since 2022. They both teach courses on Italian language and culture, comics, and audiovisual media. Sara also coordinates the elementary Italian sequence, while Leonardo serves as faculty advisor for CIAO, the University of Chicago’s Recognized Student Organization for Italian. They both greatly enjoy their work and are proud new parents of Agnese.

Sharon Ede received her MAT in French & English in 1974. she taught French at Martinsville HS for 18 years and sent many students on the Honors Program to St. Brieuc, Bretagne. She retired in 1991 and helped her husband with his pharmacy until he retired in 1998. They then moved to SC and more recently to a Senior Center in Charlotte, NC. During retirement, they traveled extensively, many times to France but also to about 25 other countries. She also wrote for the Sun City Carolina Lakes magazine for several years and is now editor of a newsletter for the Independent Living part of her senior center.  She has always been very active in their church wherever they were. They have 3 children, 6 grandchildren, and 6 great grandchildren.  Life has been good to them, and French & France has always been an important part of it. She loved her time at IU.

Forrest Gatrell (BA 2020) recently received Master’s degrees in Public Administration and International Relations from Syracuse University. He now works as an Office Research Assistant at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC. French is one of the Bank’s four working languages, and it has proved especially helpful for learning the Bank’s dominant language of Spanish!

Alyssa Johnson (2001) just moved from Austin, TX, to Durham, NC, to begin a Master's program at Duke. She will be pursuing a Master of Arts and taking courses in psychology, neuroscience, and history. With the knowledge she gains from these courses, she plans to write a book on racialized trauma as it flows through the White body.

Antonella Kim Johnson, BA 86) is still living in Bologna Italy, and is Legal Rep and Admin for LHP Europe, the European branch of LHP Engineering Solutions based out of Columbus, Indiana. Still keeping connections with BCSC Bologna (IU Overseas Study Program in Bologna) alumns. She is very disappointed about the turn of university policies and programs.

David Koon graduated with a BA in French and Spanish in 1979. After a very short teaching career and a long career in information technology, he retired in 2019. His wife and he live in Portland Oregon where they’ve lived since 1992. As he was writing this, he was where he has spent recent summers, on a sailboat in British Columbia. They travel a good deal and generally enjoy their lives.

Victoria Lagrange has recently been appointed Interim Director of the new research Center for Interactive Media at Kennesaw State University.

Pantalea Mazzitello has been hired as Assistant Professor of Teaching (Tenure Track) at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Italian Language Program.  At UCI, alongside Italian language classes, she is teaching Dante in general education courses and Renaissance comedy for students minoring in Italian or majoring in European Studies. Starting from this academic year (2025-26), she will also lead the Italian Studies Program, mentoring students towards the Minor.

John ‘Jack’ McCord (BA 1976, Ordre National du Mérite 2007) retired as Executive Director of the Alliance Francaise de Chicago in 2019 after 16 years, six months before the pandemic. During his tenure, the Alliance enlarged its footprint through collaboration and local partnerships, often swimming with the more sizeable cultural fish in Chicago as well as the French Cultural Service (now Villa Albertine). Personalities and artists from  soprano Natalie Dessay, Maryse Condé and Adam Gopnik to Gérard Depardieu, Eric Orsenna and Andrei Makine graced the premises. The Alliance retired its building debt and began a capital campaign. He remains active in raising funds for the Alliance's educational outreach programs.

Rowenna Miller is an alum from the B.A. class of '07. Since then, she has published five fantasy and historical fantasy novels (with Hachette Publishing), with the most recent having a nice tie to her French major. The Palace of Illusions is a loose Nutcracker retelling set in Paris during the run-up to the 1900 World’s Fair. She is also teaching writing at IUSB. More about her work can be found at rowennamiller.com.

Caroline Moellering continues to value her liberal arts degrees and is “nothing short of PISSED OFF at state of Indiana’s sick takeover of the university.” (French and Art History (1988))

As of this August, Vianna Newman Dennis has earned her doctorate in art history from the University of Maryland, specializing in Italian Baroque art. Currently, she is a lecturer in art history at Iowa State University in Ames, where she has been teaching since January 2023. Majoring in Italian was an important part of Vianna's excellent experience as an IU undergrad, and she appreciates the crucial role that her study of Italian has played in her development as an academic.

Carmel Owen writes for musical theater and is a produced Off-BWAY dramatist. In March 2026 her musical A MIRRORED MONET opens in London at The Charing Cross Theatre and will play until May 10th, 2026.  A full traditional musical with lots of familiar characters to French alumni/ae ...people like Monet (at age 25 and at age 76), Renoir, Bazille, Camille, Manet and others. Also studied at the Music School at IU back then as well. Loved IU.

MONET PITCH DECK

Lauren Pinzka is going to teach for the last time this year at Yale where she has been a Senior Lecturer all of these years.  Nearly 50 years of teaching at many different institutions. She has two adult children, and one has returned to New Haven, so her life is quite happy! She plans on keeping up her interest in the 19th century French novel, but she has also a great interest in the World War II period.  She was a double major at IU, French and History, and she remembers IU fondly.

Since graduating, Riley Grace Poe has spent the past two school years as an English Teaching Assistant in Annecy. Working with children in primary school has been delightful, and getting to know France through lived experience has been a real pleasure. She has also had the privilege of volunteering with refugee and asylum-seeking families through a local association, Lake Aid. Having a mixture of French and international community has been a real joy. She is heading back to Annecy à la rentrée scolaire to work as an independent language teacher, offering English and French classes for children and adults, and she will get to continue working with Lake Aid as secretary and volunteer. She thinks on the FRIT community fondly and has been so grateful seeing how her training at IU has really come alive overseas. She writes: “Bon courage et bonne continuation à toutes et à tous ; vous me manquez !”

Alisha Reaves recently returned from Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) where she participated in a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad with the American Association of Teachers of French. She was a member of a 14 person team split equally between K12 and post-secondary faculty with the goal of preparing curricular materials on Ivorian history and culture to be shared as an open educational resource with French teachers nationwide on the AATF's Resource page. They spent nearly a month (July 16 - August 11) in San-Pedro, Ivory Coast hosted by the Université Polytechnique de San-Pedro being immersed in Ivorian history and culture.

Here is a link to a summary of the program on the AATF website.

Sarah H. Shields was appointed as Magistrate to the Hamilton Superior Courts 1 & 2, and has announced her campaign for Judge of the Hamilton Superior Court 9, which will be established on January 1, 2027.

Alice Strange spent the years 1961-1967 at IU and left with A.B. (1965) and M.A. (1967) degrees in French. At that time French pedagogy was transitioning from a grammar-translation to an audio-lingual focus, and the Department had a state-of-the-art language laboratory with tape recorders. She spent the years 1967-1969 in France as an Assistante (Lycée de Filles, Reims) and a Lectrice (Universite de Grenoble). Then it was off to UW-Madison for a Ph.D.  After a couple of short-term jobs, she settled into a 34-year career at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, teaching French language, literature, and culture, and leading summer study tours to France. She retired in 2017 and still lives here. She would love to hear from alumni from her era. Her email is astrange@semo.edu

Amanda Vredenburgh shares that her book, The Contemporary Fantastic: Reimagining Reality in French Fiction, was published with Lexington Books in Dec. 2024.

John P. Welle, Italian Studies, MA (1980), PhD (1983). In 2018, he became professor emeritus of Italian Studies, and of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught since 1983. In recent years, he has continued to serve on doctoral committees, to mentor graduate students, to lecture, to collaborate with Italian Cultural Institutes, and to evaluate manuscripts for presses and journals.

He also continues to publish and present on the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto, as well as contributing book reviews on Fellini, for example, on Dante and cinema, and on Mussolini and theatre. His new research projects include Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, an Italian explorer who searched for the sources of the Mississippi River in 1823, and on Italian women writers, such as Amalia Guglielminetti.

He writes that his graduate education at Indiana University prepared him for a successful career teaching and conducting research in the humanities at the highest level; and he hopes the impressive legacy of FRIT will continue far into the future.

Emmeline Witt, graduated with a BA in French as well as International Law in 2024. She just recently returned from living in France and teaching English as part of the TAPIF program. This fall, she will be starting a master’s program at the University of Cambridge in Heritage Studies. She writes: “Thank you to the French Program for all of your support over the years.”

A native of Bloomington, Harold Wolfe received his BA in 1962.   Five years later, he decided to try his luck at moving to live in Paris. He soon found work... and more than 60 years later, he is still living and enjoying life in Paris. Today, with dual nationality, he is retired under the French retirement plan.  He travels frequently and recently spent a week at the annual theater festival in Avignon.

In Memoriam:

Mary Ellen Filipek Scandale (M. A., French, 1968) died on March 5, 2023. Following her graduation from IU, she spent a year as an Assistante in Paris. Then she taught French for 43 years at Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette, IL., accompanying students to France every two years and winning awards for her teaching. She retired in 2018. (Submitted by Alice Strange)