Julie Fette, associate professor of French studies, has won a 2022-23 Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant to further her research in Paris with the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), one of France’s most prestigious institutes of higher education.
Fette’s grant will allow her to study contemporary French children’s literature and how picture books depict experiences of migration and citizenship in ways that reveal much about French ideological norms.
Beginning around 2000, Fette noticed, French children's books began to address migration and citizenship in their stories. Fette plans to analyze how this new body of literature either espouses or opposes the French republican model of assimilation and universalism, in which newcomers are generally welcome, but on the condition of becoming “French.”