TRANSLATION
I have always lived between two languages: born and raised in southern France, I was the "little American girl" living abroad. At the age of 13 I moved to the United States and felt a bit like a fish out of water: now I was that "French girl" who wore funny clothes. In my early twenties, I was beginning to lose my French - which really felt like losing a part of myself. After a brief blush with hard sciences in my first years of college, my interests veered to the humanities and philosophy, so it seemed natural to specialize in French literature and reclaim my linguistic identity. I now teach French and Francophone language, literature, culture, and cinema, at a liberal arts college. Although bilingual, I work especially from French to English. I am available for legal translation.
TANGO
I've danced all my life, but it wasn't until a couple of months after 9/11 in 2000 while in France for graduate school that I discovered Argentine Tango. Fast forward well over a decade, and after many classes, workshops, private lessons, practicas, milongas, trips to Buenos Aires, dreamy dances, and dance heartbreaks, I taught beginner Argentine Tango and organized and DJd a monthly milonga in our community. While today I am discovering other dance forms, I am still and always available for private tango lessons. I want to make you a confident dancer!
scholarship
I teach at a liberal arts college in Maine, where my interests include translation both in theory and practice, cinema, the relationship between literature and science, questioning the mind-body dichotomy, and the aesthetics of dance. My dissertation, which is quietly gathering dust, titled— Imagination, Physiology, and Dynamics of Representation (Duke, 2005), explored the emergence of life science in various 17th and 18th-century scientific discourses, and its parallels in the changing narrative of imagination's role in the construction of identity. I wouldn't call it a page-turner, but it was a pretty investigative account of scientific narratives of the imagination. My interests in movement, imagination, and critical theory led me to further explore, confront, and, yes, question my fascination with Tango. I have written and presented (note: not published, at least yet) on the rich and complex “lead/follow” dichotomy between partners, fetishism, nostalgia, the community of dancers punctuated by gazes and desire, the narrative dance, and the essential mind-body connection. Strangely, all this seems to take me back to my initial inquiries in the 17th and 18th-century scientific narratives into the nature of imagination.
