Amber R. Sackett

Amber is a 7th-year Ph.D. candidate in the French and Francophone Studies department. She graduated cum laude from Grand Valley State University in 2017, earning a Bachelor of Arts in French language and culture with minors emphases in Arabic language & Middle East studies. She studied abroad in Morocco (2014) and France (2016) as a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholar. In 2016-17 she conducted research on representations of Arabs, Islam, and Sarrasins in Diderot’s Encyclopédie as a Ronald E. McNair Scholar.

As a graduate student at UCLA, Amber served as the UCLA French Grad Student Association president in 2019-2020 and on the 2022 ELTS Graduate Student Conference: Permenance & Decay organizing committee. Amber completed her 2nd-year exams in 2020 and successfully defended her prospectus, “Colonial Uprooting: Reframing Carnets d’Orient through Land & Food,” in 2022.

In 2020, Amber and fellow UCLA graduate student Kelly Roso launched Oddflower Creations, a small business that caters to the slow fashion movement by creating quirky ornaments for ears, hair, and home.

Amber is finishing a dissertation project focusing on representations of land, agriculture, and food consumption in the French graphic novel series Carnets d’Orient (1994-2009) by Jacques Ferrandez.