Marie-Cecile Ganne-Schiermeier

Assistant Teaching Professor in French and Francophone Studies

Contact
Phone:
+1 (781) 283-2412
Email:
mgannesc@wellesley.edu
Department
French, Francophone, and Italian Studies

Academic focus includes authorship, textual strategies, and the fashioning of subjectivity. Passionate about teaching and her commitment to students.

 
A native of southwest France, Marie-Cécile Ganne-Schiermeier holds a Ph.D. in French literature and an MA in English literature from Boston University, as well as a Licence de lettres modernes from La Sorbonne. She has taught at several institutions, including UMass Amherst, Boston University, Fordham University and Drew University. She is committed to seeking out new and enhanced pedagogical approaches, including the use of technology in the classroom, and is dedicated to teaching and to her students. 
 
Her academic focus includes anonymously authored early modern French texts, and her research concentrates on authorship, textual strategies and the fashioning of subjectivity. She also studies the history of French gastronomy, with a focus on chocolate’s emergence as a culinary and social commodity in early modern France. Last year, she independently published her début novel Scent of a Truffle, from manuscript to launch. The novel received the 2025 People’s Choice Award from Readable Feast, a program of The Food Voice, a federally chartered 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Education

  • M.A., Boston University
  • Ph.D., Boston University

Current and upcoming courses

Challenging Literary Tradition: Women and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

FREN208

Through the centuries, women's writing has been ignored, criticized and maligned. It was only in the 1970s and 80s that the place of women in literature was recognized and their originality and creativity fully studied. In this course,  we will examine how women authors break with social language and literary codes, how they express themselves through familiar genres such as the novel and poetry but also less "mainstream" ones: fairy tales and letters. We will view these women not as the object of desire or discourse, but as subjects thinking and creating independently, expressing their desires, their wishes for themselves and humanity, their vision of society and the world, and their own experience of love, power and powerlessness.

  • French Language, Literatures, and Cultures

    FREN201

    Reading, writing, and speaking skills and critical thinking are developed through analysis and discussion of cultural and literary texts. Issues of cultural diversity, globalization, and identity are considered. Thorough grammar review.