Elizabeth Collins

Elizabeth M. Collins is currently a visiting scholar at the École normale supérieure in Paris where she is conducting research for her dissertation, thanks to the generous support of the Bourse Jeanne Marandon of the Société des professeurs français et francophones d’Amérique (SPFFA) and the Walter J. Jensen Fellowship of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her dissertation—entitled “A Place at the Table: French Colonialism, Vietnamese Diaspora, and the Relational Dynamics of Food in Contemporary Women’s Literature”— examines the role of the French empire and cuisine in the contemporary works of women writers of Vietnamese origin. The recipient of two Foreign-Language and Area Studies Fellowships (2014, 2015), she has studied Vietnamese at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) at University of Wisconsin-Madison and in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Prior to graduate school, Elizabeth taught French at an independent school and at the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy, as well as taught English in la Réunion. She has also lead linguistic- and cultural-immersion trips to France, Quebec, Morocco, and South Africa. She graduated from Hamilton College with a B.A. in French in 2010.