Anna Troyansky

The program in French Linguistics brought me back to Texas, the state where I grew up, after eight years away.  I studied French at Bowdoin College, a small liberal-arts college in Maine, where I wrote an honors project on written and oral variants of the type of fairy tale where children are left in the woods by their parents (i.e. Jeannot et Margot, Le Petit Poucet).  I spent my junior year abroad in Paris through the Hamilton College program  and took most of my courses at Paris III and the Institut Catholique where I first got a taste of linguistics.  After graduating, I taught foreign language for four years – teaching English in primary schools in Brittany and then middle and high school level French in Virginia.  From personal experience of living in France (Versailles, Limousin, Paris) and learning French at a young age (age 7 and 12), I am now interested in studying issues in bilingualism, relating to both language acquisition and language contact.  I have spent summers leading student trips to France, attending the LSA summer institute (2009), and studying Arabic intensively.  I have incorporated this interest in Arabic into several projects in French linguistics courses.  At the moment, I am doing sociohistorical work on variation in the use aller and être in family letters dating from the 19th century.  I will be presenting this paper at Diachro 6 in Belgium this fall. Outside of class, I have been involved in FIGSO, directing and producing UT French department's student productions of Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Racine's Les Plaideurs.