Dr. Lauren Ravalico
Associate Professor of French and Associate Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program
Dr. Lauren Ravalico holds a B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She specializes in feminist and feminocentric approaches to the interpretation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature, art, and culture. Her scholarship has appeared in The Comparatist, George Sand Studies, Women in French Studies, and the edited volume, Germaine de Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions. Her current research addresses the question of Orientalism in the Occidental imaginary. This research is taking shape as separate but interrelated projects on two feminized spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French cultural production: the Algerian harem and the colonial island garden.
Dr. Ravalico served as inaugural director of the School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs (LCWA) Signature Series, a year of high-impact, interdisciplinary programming about “Global Foodways” that she curated with the support of a major grant award from South Carolina Humanities. She created a cultural history course, “The Culture of the French Table,” for the Signature Series and published an essay about its design in Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French Classroom (Routledge 2022). In addition, she built “¡Adelante!,” an LCWA mentoring and scholarship program that liaises with the Office of Institutional Diversity to support students’ academic achievement and well-being at the College. She is a recipient of the ExCEL Award for Outstanding Faculty Member in LCWA for creating a campus environment that promotes diversity, inclusion, and excellence.
Dr. Ravalico 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.