Dr. Lauren Ravalico
Associate Professor of French and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program
Dr. Ravalico holds a B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A specialist in feminist readings of Francophone Romanticism and Exoticism, her work on literature and visual culture has appeared in The Comparatist, George Sand Studies, Women in French, and the edited volume, Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions. Her current research examines two feminized spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural production: the Algerian harem and the colonial island garden.
Ravalico also contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning, with a focus on high-impact methods and classroom environment. She has long experimented with using food to understand diversity and create community, especially in the context of language learning. She directed “Global Foodways,” a yearlong, interdisciplinary programming initiative with support from a South Carolina Humanities Major Grant. Her work on critical food studies appeared subsequently in Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom (Routledge, 2022). Another project, supported with internal grants, emphasizes learning environment as inclusive curriculum by investigating the combined implementation of Montessori methods and feminist pedagogies in the public university classroom.
A recipient of the ExCEL Award for Outstanding Faculty Member in the School of Languages, Cultures and World Affairs, she enjoys teaching all levels of French and Francophone Studies as well as in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is fluent in French and Italian and has also studied German, Latin, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish.