Undergraduate Success Stories

Elissa Bell, B.A. 1995

Fulbright Award, France, 1996.
Now completing a Ph.D. in French at Princeton University

During freshman orientation weekend in the fall of 1991, my parents and I attended an information session on the Angers program. That fall, I took Prof. Martin's Civilization and Culture class and kept attending evening meetings about the Angers program at which alum would show slides and exhort us freshmen to quit asking questions and just sign up to go to France.

Sophomore year was as exciting as promised. New places, new friends, new things to eat and drink and many letters back to the U.S. recounting these discoveries. It was also during that year in Angers that I sensed myself starting to read in French without thinking in English.

When I returned to Notre Dame as a junior in the fall of 1993, I entered the Program of Liberal Studies and continued to take courses in French. By the fall of my senior year, inspired by Prof. MacKenzie's textual analysis course and a literature tutorial in PLS taught by Prof. Fallon, I knew I wanted to pursue graduate study in literature. After graduation, I spent another academic year in France--this time in Lille--as an "assistante d'anglais" in two middle schools. I also audited some courses at a local university where we read Flaubert's Education sentimentale, half of Proust's Du Côté de Guermantes as well as a play by Marivaux.
I entered the Ph.D. program in French Literature at Princeton in the fall of 1996; my dissertation is on Samuel Beckett's short prose. The close reading and critical writing exemplified by my instructors at Notre Dame, along with their unwavering dedication to teaching, continue to inspire me.