Senior Lecturer Lauren Pinzka Has Retired

This tribute was read at the May 15th Yale College Faculty Meeting.

“Lauren Pinzka, AB, Indiana University, Bloomington; PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison; faculty member at Yale since 1992: You are a specialist in the nineteenth-century French novel, with a particular focus on cultural history, psychoanalysis, and gender studies who has recently returned to your undergraduate passion in history. Over many years in the classroom, you have introduced generations of students not only to the intricacies of the French language and textual analysis but also to the pleasures of its literature and culture, engaging them with your quick mind, professional skill, and warmth.

In your early days at Yale you were a master teacher of the Capretz method, the language-immersion method combining audio, visual, and print that for years was the gold standard in teaching French—often teaching along Pierre Capretz himself. A colleague from another department, happening to pass your classroom door one day while you were teaching, mesmerized by your voice, paused to listen. He came away dazzled by the energy, passion, and enthusiasm you generated among students as you whizzed around the classroom, encouraging, cajoling, correcting, affirming, all in the beautifully accented French that has been admired by colleagues who are native French speakers.

Your scholarly interests—especially nineteenth century French literature, gender studies, and cultural memory—informed all of the texts you brought into the classroom, offering students a window into French culture in general. Over time you began to teach literature as well as language. Indeed you revamped French 170 (now 1700), the important bridge course between language and literature, in which students learn to read—and write critically—in French, making it your own. In the course students read iconic writers, among them Flaubert, Molière, Balzac, Baudelaire, Duras, and Genet, and you varied the reading list each semester.  In more recent years, you added contemporary Francophone writers, including Hassaine and LaFerrière to the reading list.

In the same way, your intensive course in advanced French language drew on all of your expertise, using films, videos, fiction, and articles to engage and enlighten your students of French and Francophone culture, while enhancing their comprehension and fluency.

You were never stuck in the past. Pedagogy has been an enduring interest, and among your many contributions to the department are the authorship of two major departmental reports that required surveying peer institutions: one on introductory Francophone literature courses, and the other a review of introductory French programs in the United States. This second report, the “Pinkza Report,” served as the inspiration and impetus for the department’s current Level one through five curricular revisions. 

For your excellence as a teacher of “une langue élégante, poétique et riche,” and for introducing your students to French intellectual life and to the big issues of twentieth and twenty-first century history and cultural studies, and for your pedagogical services to the department over many years, your colleagues wish you “merci mille fois pour tout,” and, having been long acquainted with you, know you will continue with a very full and busy life.”