Three Strategies for Promoting Intellectual Engagement in Advanced Undergraduate Seminars

With the humanities increasingly contested, we must adopt pedagogical approaches that promote the integral role of humanistic inquiry in student academic achievement. Whether they explore the eighteenth-century novel, cultural artifacts of the Third Republic, or sociopolitical controversies in contemporary literature, the three models described in this article propose innovative learning strategies for advanced undergraduate French and Francophone Studies seminars that fulfill the humanistic goals of the American university. From directed close reading exercises to analysis of the historical archive to creative exploratory writing, these activities engage students intellectually with complex cultural and narrative materials from diverse traditions and periods.

Transnationalism and Identity: the Concept of Community in Ghanaian Literature and Contemporary Ghanaian Culture

In my thesis, I use anthropology, literature, and adinkra, an indigenous art, to study Ghanaian concepts of community from an interactive standpoint. While each of these disciplines has individually been used to study the concept of community, the three have not previously been discussed in relation to one another. I explore the major findings of each field—mainly that in anthropology, transnational informants find communities upheld; in literature, transnational characters find the opposite; and in adinkra, there are elements of both continuity and dissolution—to discuss Ghanaian constructs of community in the transnational world. Throughout time, there have always been transnational individuals and concepts, but as globalization continues, transnationalism has become an ever-more vital topic, and combined with the common anthropological discussion of tradition and modernity, its influence on developing countries, like Ghana, is significant. Therefore, in my thesis, I explore how differing conceptions of community present themselves in each discipline, and how those divergences create a new understanding of place and identity.