Welcome

With a staff of internationally known scholars and teachers, the Department of French Studies offers an unusually broad range of courses in French and Francophone language, literature, and civilization.

French Studies at Rice University integrates several disciplinary perspectives in the study of contemporary France and the broader French-speaking world. Accordingly, the faculty includes literary theorists, philosophers, historians, linguists, cultural critics, as well as language instructors.

The program seeks to situate French culture within the broadest possible context of European and world thought and history as a crucial component of those over-arching historical phenomena known as "the West" and "modernity".

The program courses reflect this intellectual diversity and thus range the fields of not only language and literature, but also social science, history, philosophy, and the respective studies of feminism, gender, film, and post-colonialism.