Candace Skorupa is passionate about teaching, mentoring, and creating communities inside and outside of the classroom. She loves teaching all levels of French language and literature, particularly the L1-L5 sequence, from beginner to advanced. She has been a member of the Yale faculty since 2005.
As the French Language Program Director, Skorupa values collaboration and transparency above all, and oversees all aspects of the undergraduate language curriculum, including the coordination of graduate student teaching in French, curricular development, and the placement test. She works closely with the DUS on initiatives for the major and the language certificate, to coordinate courses and resources that best suit students’ needs.
Interdisciplinary and multisensory experiences are a central part of Skorupa’s courses, which might include having students listen to recent Francophone pop music, sing a French song, try a few steps of a French baroque dance, alongside curated visits to work with experts at the Yale Art Gallery, the music library, special collections at Yale, or the Yale Farm.
A proponent of seeking virtual cross-cultural connections long before Facetime or Zoom existed, Skorupa has incorporated telecollaborative projects with the grande école Télécom-ParisTech into her courses for almost twenty years, emphasizing the unparalleled linguistic and cultural learning that takes place in peer-to-peer virtual exchanges.
Candace Skorupa is also a lecturer in the department of Comparative Literature, where she often teaches a first-year seminar, Literature 022, “Music and Literature.” She was the Senior Essay Coordinator in Comparative Literature from 2008 to 2019. Her literary interests include nineteenth-century literature and music, Proust, Baudelaire, Berlioz, Symbolist poetry, and the art song. She loves thinking about languages and literatures in a comparative interdisciplinary context, and she has studied Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Polish.
Skorupa received her Ph.D. (2000), M.Phil. (1996), and B.A. (1992) in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Her dissertation, “Music and Letters: Correspondances of Notes and Narrative from Berlioz to Proust,” was directed by Sterling Professor Emeritus Peter Brooks. She taught French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University (1999-2002) and in the Department of French at Smith College (2002-2005). She taught English at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Lyon, France, with the Fulbright Teaching Assistantship program, now TAPIF (1992-93). In her free time, she enjoys playing the piano and flute, taking long walks, running, yoga, biking, dancing, baking French desserts, playing with her two cats, and occasionally roller skating with her daughter.