Pierre Forfert is a PhD candidate in the French Department at Yale, where he is also completing certificates in Environmental Humanities and Second Language Acquisition. He received his B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Sorbonne Université, and holds an M.A. in Communications from CELSA (École des Hautes Études en Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication).
Working across literary criticism, cultural history and craft studies, his research explores the encroachment of modernity onto the nineteenth-century French landscape. His dissertation, “Woodworks: Novel Matters of French Realism,” investigates how the material culture of timber shaped the narrative economy of the nineteenth-century French realist novel. His work appeared in Research in African Literatures, the Balzac Review, and French Forum.
At Yale, Pierre has served as instructor of French (Beginner French I & II) and as a teaching assistant for literature courses. He previously taught French literature and culture as a language fellow in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College. He has also worked for Franco-American academic exchange programs such as the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris and Fulbright France.