Dr. Barbara Klaw - Professor of French

I Love French Language and Culture

Like many of you, as an undergraduate I attended a four-year public university where many of the students tried to juggle families and jobs as they earned their degrees. I lived on a co-ed foreign language floor (French, German, and Spanish) in a dorm. My roommate and I signed contracts to speak to each other in French whenever possible. Every night all the French students ate dinner together in a special section of the dining hall as we spoke in French with our resident native French speaker and some French professors. Every semester we had special language- and culture-oriented dinners and parties. Every fall, we went on a nature retreat with the other students and native speakers where we would play games in our target language, eat international dishes, learn vocabulary, and sing foreign songs around a campfire into the wee hours of the night. During summer vacations, I waited on tables and ran coffee bars in a big hotel near O'Hare Airport in Chicago so I eventually also studied 4 semesters of Spanish to be able to converse with the Mexican restaurant help who spoke little English at that time.

After majoring in French Translation and Business and getting a minor in International Affairs, I worked as a temp (administrative work) while I sought full time employment. I wanted a job using French, but I got an offer that seemed too good to refuse financially for a first job. My first full-time job was as a Junior Sales Analyst at a trucking firm where I calculated tonnage reports, made string maps, took care of sales aids, corresponded with clients and companies and did whatever else my bosses required. I missed using my French, my company soon merged with another, and there were many lay offs. My second full-time job was as an Inside Sales Representative at a subsidiary of a French firm selling electric motors, (okay, not exactly my cup of tea, but I did get to use my rapidly disappearing French occasionally). I developed a real skill for discussing rotors and stators and placating clients in all areas of the United States. I decided to go back to Graduate School soon after the efficiency experts arrived. When it was my turn to be interviewed by them and I was asked where I saw myself in the company in 10 years, I realized that I didn't see myself anywhere. I wanted to use my French on a daily basis and to teach; I had no intrinsic love for motors even though the financial rewards were very good and my job allowed me to work with many French engineers.

I started my graduate studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois where I took a memorable class on the entire works of Samuel Beckett, another on Molière's plays, some classes on translation, phonetics, discourse analysis, teaching methods, the eighteenth-century French novel, and the nineteenth-century French novel. After spending a summer at Université Laval in Quebec to study Quebecois language and culture (a program offered through Northwestern), for family reasons I transferred to University of Pennsylvania where I studied teaching methods, Old French, sixteenth-century poetry, the works of nineteenth-century writer, Gérard de Nerval, French Feminism, twentieth-century novel, narratology and more. During all of my Graduate studies at Northwestern and Penn I taught courses in beginning, intermediate, or advanced French as part of my education. I ended up specializing in Twentieth-Century Novel and more specifically in the works of Simone de Beauvoir. My dissertation was entitled Men, Women, Narrative and Power in the Novels of Simone de Beauvoir.