Wesleyan University Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Liana is Associate Professor of the Practice in French at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University. She earned her Ph.D. in French from Princeton University, following an M.A. in French Studies (2011) and a B.A. in Education (French & Russian, 2009) from the University of Arizona.

Her research centers on 20th-21st century translingual literature of French expression with a focus on migration, multilingualism, and self-writing. Her scholarship has been published in The French Review, Interfrancophonies, The Journal of Literary Multilingualism, and in an edited volume on Vassilis Alexakis (Presses Universitaires de Rennes). Her most recent contribution to the special issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES is titled “Through the Translingual Lens: Persian Calligraphy in Mana Neyestani’s L’Araignée de Mashhad.” In this article, she analyzes the intersection of multilingualism and visual modality in a graphic narrative.

Liana is committed to pedagogy and student mentoring. Over the last two years, in addition to teaching, she updated the curriculum across several lower-division courses in Wesleyan’s French language program. In Spring 2024, she taught a new advanced seminar entitled “French Society in Music from the Roaring Twenties to Today,” which examines French 20th-21st century history through the lens of popular songs. Students analyzed the relationship between significant cultural events and social changes in France and the music of their era, as well as contemporary songs addressing themes like decolonization, gender, social justice, multilingualism, and immigration. Outside the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Liana co-taught an interdisciplinary seminar “Perspectives in Arts as Culture: Ukrainian Arts and Language as Resistance” (Fall 2023). Outside the classroom, she serves as House Advisor to the Maison Francophone.

Prior to joining Wesleyan, Liana worked as Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Foreign Languages at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she taught a range of French courses, served as an academic advisor, and was the officer in charge of the French Forum. From 2015 to 2018, Liana served as a Visiting Instructor in Bryn Mawr College’s summer study abroad program (Institut d’Avignon), where she taught francophone literature, grammar, and creative writing.