Elizabeth Brereton Allen

Elizabeth Allen received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1995. She has been teaching at Washington University since 1994, and has been coordinating the Elementary French sequence since 2000. She is also in charge of the Conversation, Culture, and Communication series, French 215-216. She teaches courses on a wide variety of cultural subjects, including French Cinema, Paris, and the literary avant-garde. In her courses, she attempts to communicate the importance of culture as actual, lived experience to her students, preferring to take the subject matter “off the page” and into their daily lives. Her classes therefore include a variety of creative activities, such as poem recitations, French cooking, the creation of dada and surrealist collages, film-making, automatic writing, and discussions of ethics and values. French and Francophone literature and culture serve as a vibrant, prismatic window through which students may discover a heightened sense of self, of community, and of their place in the world at large.