Jackqueline Frost is a Ph.D. student in the Romance Studies Department of Cornell University. Her work centers on francophone Caribbean literature and intellectual history, and in how poetics (broadly conceived) informs and is informed by social life and collective memory, particularly among Atlantic World intellectuals in the era of formal decolonization. Her specific interests include non-European surrealism, conceptions of poetic violence in ‘Négritude’ thought, colonial psychiatry, revolutionary romanticism, and creolization. Hailing from Southern Louisiana, she is a heritage speaker of Cajun/creole French and teaches standard French at Cornell.
She is author of several collections of poetry in English, and is active in the world of anglophone experimental writing.
https://compline.tumblr.com/authors/jackquelinefrost
Adam Schoene
Ph.D. candidate, French
I was drawn to Cornell for its commitment to internationalism and interdisciplinarity, as well as for its rich history of literary theory and criticism. I arrived at Cornell in 2012 from Tufts, where I studied French and International Relations, and coordinated summer programs for its European Center, a satellite campus located in the French Alps. I previously worked for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and instructed French for a high school study abroad program in Switzerland. I pursued a fellowship at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, where I examined international law, global health diplomacy and human rights. I am currently exploring intersections of law and literature, cosmopolitanism, sovereignty and the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Emily Vazquez-Enriquez
Graduate student, Spanish
I am a Ph.D. student in the department of Romance Studies in the Spanish section. I hold a Licenciatura in Hispanic literature (Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Mexico, 2012), and an MA in Spanish with specialization in Latin American literature (The University of Texas at El Paso, 2015). In my master’s thesis, “Literature on the northern Mexican border: An analysis of the pragmatic discourse,” I compare literary works that include the northern border of Mexico in their narrative. My analysis is based on the intellectual and/or affective connection of the authors with the border zone. Speech pragmatics, politics of affect, space representation, and potential audience effects are the main areas I developed.
Still focused on the field of border studies, at Cornell my research is centered on the intersections and divergences between the northern and southern borders of Mexico. Border technologies, environmental disturbance, human losses, migration policies, and the networks of meanings that literature, cinema, and mass media bestow upon the border realities, are elements that shape the core concerns of my research. Since day one, Cornell has given me the opportunity to advance in an interdisciplinary approach dedicated to the study of the intertwinement of the Mexican borderlines.
Yen Vu
Graduate Student, French
After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2012, I spent a year at The Institute of French Studies at New York University to earn a Masters degree. Since then, I have been continuously drawn to the intersection between history and literature, that is, examining the cultural and political vestiges of French colonialism manifested in literary expression. Some questions that shape my research direction include: What are the political implications of using a language that is one’s own and one that isn’t? How did French and Western thinking influence Vietnamese intellectuals, before, during and in the wake of claiming Vietnam's independence? And more specific to literature; how does writing archive or displace experiences that are in-between these transitions, these geographical boundaries, these languages?
I am fortunate that Cornell supports an interdisciplinarity that has encouraged me to become a part of the Southeast Asia Program, in which I am concentrating my minor. My extension beyond the department has given me the opportunity to not only work with scholars in other fields, but also to foster my personal interests through extracurricular discussions on Asian-American identity, contemporary Vietnamese studies, and creative writing.
For more information on my research and teaching: yennvu.com
