At this year’s Yale Commencement, the Department of French proudly celebrated four students receiving the PhD in French.
Congratulations to:
Xinyu Guan
“Shanghai Fiction: Literary, Cinematic, and Architectural Perspectives”
Advisor: Jill Jarvis and Alice Kaplan
Xinyu Guan’s dissertation is an ambitious and compelling study of Shanghai as represented across literature, film, and architecture from the early to late twentieth century. It situates itself at the forefront of scholarship on Chinese modernity and Shanghai urban culture, offering an original contribution that assembles a multilingual, multimedia corpus around the experience of a city.
Louise Moulin (December 2025)
“Quand le livre publie le théâtre : auctorialité, librairie, réception (1624-1680)”
Advisor: Dominique Brancher
Louise Moulin’s dissertation is devoted to the publication of French drama in the seventeenth century. It deals with the paratextual treatment of the relationship between performed and printed play, the construction of authorship in the paratext of playbooks, and the place of printed playbooks in the book trade.
Tiffany Premand
“Canonique Ta Mère ! Rewriting The French Classics in The #MeToo Era”
Advisor: Morgane Cadieu
Tiffany Premand’s dissertation proposes to examine what becomes of seventeenth-century canonical literature when it is revisited by contemporary women authors such as Neige Sinno, Vanessa Springora, Annie Ernaux, Maria Pourchet and Christine Angot. This corpus prompts us to think about sexual violence at the juncture of twentieth and twenty-first centuries, giving voice to the silences of classical texts.
Jeanne Sauvage
“The Translator’s Workshop: The French Invention of U.S. Literature”
Advisor: Alice Kaplan
In her dissertation, Jeanne Sauvage rereads mid-century American literature through its transformation in the hands of French translators. Drawing on an impressive range of archival materials, she advances a clear and ambitious thesis: that translation should be understood not as a secondary or derivative operation, but as a primary site of literary production and canon formation.
We are very proud of their accomplishments and grateful for their contributions to the intellectual life of the department. Warmest congratulations to Xinyu Guan, Louise Moulin, Tiffany Premand, and Jeanne Sauvage! We wish them all the very best in their future endeavors.