Kelsey Madsen joined the Modern Languages department at Grove City College in Fall 2018 as an Assistant Professor of French. She completed her Ph.D. in French at the University of Oklahoma in May 2018. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French literature and culture. Her research interests include intertextuality, memory, immigration, monuments, and national identity. Titled “Raising Their Voices: Memory, Justice, and Genre in Second-Generation French Literature,” her dissertation examined texts by Lydie Salvayre, Patrick Modiano, and Zahia Rahmani. She is interested in how these authors draw upon other literary texts in order to reframe the traumas endured by their parents’ generation and to create textual countermonuments.
She has presented her research at conferences such as the Mnemonics Network for Memory Studies (London, 2015), the Modern Language Association Convention (Austin, 2016), and the International Colloquium for 20th- and 21st-Century French and Francophone Studies (2019). She also attended the 2018 MLA Convention in New York City as a Connected Academics Career Development Fellow, and she chaired a panel on lieux de mémoire at the NeMLA in Pittsburgh (April 2018).
Kelsey spent a year in Strasbourg, France studying French literature and history, and she attended an intensive German-language summer program in Braunschweig, Germany.
Kelsey has taught classes such as Beginning French (face-to-face and online), French Composition and Style, and the History and Memory of WWII in French Culture. In 2011 and 2013 she received the Award for Excellence in Teaching French from the Modern Languages department at the University of Oklahoma, and in 2018 she received the Nancy L. Mergler Dissertation Completion Fellowship. In Spring 2018, she taught as an instructor at Kent State University.