Featured FRIT Alumni/ae
Our alumni/ae have achieved high levels of success across a multitude of industries - here are a few that we would like to celebrate!
- Read more about Caitlin Dahl's FRIT experience (PhD in French, 2023)
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Dr. Caitlin Dahl currently holds a position as an Assistant Professor of French & Francophone Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She completed her PhD in French at the University of Pittsburgh with certificates in Cultural Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies (GSWS), with the defense of her dissertation, “Queer Galanterie: Accommodating Queer Histories and Bodies in Early Modern France,” in 2023. Dr. Dahl specializes in queer studies, gender and sexuality studies, and 17th-century studies with an interest in diverse texts from early-modern media to fictional memoirs, to short stories. Her first article, “Queer Community Strategies: Diversity and Honnêteté in Choisy’s Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville” was published in Cahiers du dix-septième in 2023.Dr. Dahl is one of a group of eight specialists working on a digital, bilingual anthology of selected nouvelles or short stories published in the important early modern periodical, Le Mercure galant under the direction of Jean Donneau de Visé from 1672-1710. Dahl’s other research interests include queer philology and visual culture in early modern media and modes of femininity under the Ancien régime, youth and gender fluidity in early modern French literature and thought, and the construction of Nation through literature.
- Read more about Don Joseph's FRIT experience (PhD in French, 2023)
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Dr. Don Joseph completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 in French where he wrote a dissertation entitled: “Queering Migration: Fragmented (Post)Colonial Subjectivities in 21st-Century Middle Eastern and North African Literature.” Dr. Joseph is currently a Preparing Future Faculty for Inclusive Excellence (PFFIE) Postdoctoral Scholar and Assistant Professor of French and Migration Studies at the University of Missouri–Columbia. He is a scholar of the contemporary Mediterranean and studies migration, exile, (non)belonging and masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa to understand the impact of movement and displacement on LGBTQIA+ migrants.
Dr. Joseph has published or has forthcoming publications with Edinburgh University Press, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, and the Journal of Composition Studies. He has also presented at several national and international conferences such as the International Graphic Novel & Comics Conference, the International Bande Dessinée Society, the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies (SFPS), the 20th-and 21st- Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, among others.
- Read more about Matthew Maida's FRIT experience (Italian, 2022)
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Matthew Maida graduated from the Pitt Italian program in Spring of 2022. Following graduation, Matthew moved from Pittsburgh, PA to Bra, Italy to complete a Master’s of Applied Gastronomy: Culinary Arts at the Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche di Pollenzo. In this interdisciplinary program, Matthew is studying the science behind sustainable culinary arts and gastronomy—such as food chemistry, psychology, neuroscience, microbiology, ecology, taste science, and sensory science, along with technical culinary skills. Matthew writes: “I am excited to harness all that I have learned during my time in the Pitt Italian program and apply it to my next endeavor here in Italy!”
- Read more about Christopher Kaiser's FRIT experience (MA in Italian, 2008)
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Christopher Kaiser is a 2008 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh's MA program in Italian. He continued his study of Italian literature at Yale University, graduating from the Ph.D. program in 2019. While at Yale, he served as the Graduate Fellow at the Center for Language Study, an experience that inspired him to pursue a career in language program administration. In 2016, he became the Program Manager of the Shared Course initiative, a collaboration for sharing less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) between Columbia, Cornell, and Yale. His areas of interest include second language pedagogy, distance learning, presence in the distance environment, inter-institutional collaboration, and language-learning advocacy.
- Read more about Ariel Klinghoffer's FRIT experience (French, 2019)
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Ariel Klinghoffer graduated from Pitt in 2019 with a B.A. in French as well as a B.S. in Neuroscience. In her senior year, she wrote and defended an honors thesis in French on the pedagogical use of English in French foreign language settings. After graduating, she moved to Lille, France where she worked as an English language assistant in two middle schools. During the pandemic, she stayed in France, moving to Paris where she first completed an M1 in Film Studies at Université Paris Nanterre, and then pursued and completed an M1 in Literary Translation at Université Paris 8. For her M1 thesis in translation, she translated 30 pages of Pauline Gonthier’s novel, Les oiseaux sauvages, and wrote a commentary regarding the sociocultural translation of gender and sexuality regarding the transition from France to the USA. She has since returned to the USA where she is working towards an MPH at George Washington University and hopes to pursue a medical career in the near future. She concurrently works as a freelance translator, hoping to one day translate novels and poetry alongside her other pursuits.