Author Biography
Cécile Raas is a 1st-year PhD student at Princeton’s Department of French and Italian. Her research focuses on animal studies, ecocriticism, gender, and their interactions with literature. With a double concentration in 19th-century French literature and 20th-century American poetry, Cécile Raas is particularly interested in intermediality and interdisciplinarity in a comparative approach to literature. She presented the findings of her master’s research at the University of Delaware on the figure of the animal-woman in film adaptations of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin at the conference “Gender, Emotions, and Animality,” organized by the junior research group RAT (Recherches Animalières Transdisciplinaires) in June 2024. She is also soon to co-publish an article with Dr Edgard Sankara on the economic and political power of costume in French-speaking movies from West Africa. Her thesis will focus on the interaction of gender and animality in Émile Zola’s novels.
Cécile Raas was awarded the Theodore E.D. Braun Graduate Award for the 2024-2025 academic year in recognition of her academic distinctions in French studies at the University of Delaware. She has also been part of the national society of excellence in French, Pi Delta Phi, since 2024. Beyond academia, Cécile Raas also devotes herself to fiction and poetic writing, hoping one day to share her texts with the public.
