Constance Sherak holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. from the University of California at Davis. Prior to teaching at Yale, she taught at Dartmouth College and Connecticut College.
Sherak is the Language Program Director and the adviser to study abroad in the French Department. She teaches a range of L1-L5 language, literature, and culture courses at Yale and regularly incorporates the visual arts into all levels of her teaching. She has taught in Yale Summer Session in Paris for several summers and takes a deep interest in promoting study abroad for students of French at all levels.
Sherak’s research interests include writing and cinema pedagogy, modern literature and visual culture, and memory studies. Her dissertation examined collective memory, word and image, and the rhetoric of the museum in the nineteenth-century novel. She has since expanded her research beyond the museum to broader questions concerning the collection as a site for debates in modern and contemporary historiography, consumer culture, and art criticism. Sherak has published on the rhetoric of violence under the Restoration, museums on film in the works of Duras, the semiotics of Christo’s environmental works, and on boulevard culture at Paris-Las Vegas.