"An American in Lyon: Reflections on a Semester as a Visiting Scholar in France"

Dr. Dean de la Motte, Professor of Modern Languages, will present an overview of his recent sabbatical in France, where he was a visiting scholar at the Université Catholique de Lyon (Lyon Catholic University, also known as l’UCLy). His activities at the university included, in addition to his own scholarship, participation in an interdisciplinary research group, a series of guest lectures in both French and English, and the recording of a video encouraging UCLy students to study abroad. His presentation will also offer insights into some of the differences and similarities between the institutional cultures of l’UCLy and Salve Regina and, more generally, between universities in France and the United States.

Dean de la Motte has degrees in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; he studied French and German at the Université de Poitiers (France) and the Deutsche Schule of Middlebury College (Vermont), respectively. The co-editor of Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (U Mass Press) and Approaches to Teaching Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (MLA), he has published a wide range of articles on nineteenth-century French literature and culture and numerous essays on the teaching of literature. From 2000 to 2014 he worked as a chief academic officer, including eight years as the provost of Salve Regina University. His first novel, Oblivion: The Lost Diaries of Branwell Brontë (Valley Press, UK) will be published in July 2022.