Summer in France
About the Program Director:
Dr. Elizabeth Locey
| In Kansas: Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures Campus Box 4024 1200 Commercial Street Emporia, KS 66801 work phone: 316/341-5520 |
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In France: Le Haut Chandon 37400 Amboise FRANCE phone and fax |
My name is Dr. Elizabeth Locey and I established the ESU Summer in France program last year (1999-2000), my third year here at Emporia State.
For complete information about my professional background, please see my department faculty homepage .
Here, I'll just keep it to the basics. I got my Master's with distinction and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My undergraduate degree was interdisciplinary, combining courses in French, art history, literature, and Women's Studies. Many of those courses, in fact, were taken when I was a student at the Institut de Touraine! I spent my junior year abroad first in Paris at the Sorbonne and then at the Institut, and summers there, too, at the ages of 16 and 18, so I know first-hand what the July courses are like.
These courses were not my initial contact with the city of Tours, or even the Institut, however. My first trip to Tours was in 1970, at the age of 2, when my parents—both professors of French at Bowling Green State University in Ohio—directed an academic year abroad program at the Institut de Touraine. They continued to direct year abroad and summer programs in Tours for the next twenty-five years. I was lucky enough to tag along on many of these trips, learning French language and culture in the process. Thirty years later, in the Summer of 2000, I brought my long apprenticeship to fruition when I took my own group of students to Tours. I knew that my program would be a success, based, as it was, on the decades of successful summers abroad that my parents had led, and I was not disappointed. . . nor, I believe, were the students. One student couldn't help observing, on a daily basis and much to his astonishment, that they were the happiest weeks of his life.
While in France, I reside in Le Haut Chandon—a tiny hamlet just off the main road between Tours and Amboise—where my family maintains a home. Having me stay there substantially reduces student costs (most programs factor director room and board into their fees), and I am just a phone call away from the students. Of course, we will see each other every day of the four weeks, either at the Institut's morning break or for afternoon excursions and literature discussions—and often both.
I hope that you choose to join me this July for ESU's Summer in France. Directing this program is a kind of dream come true for me, but the real payoff comes in seeing the changes that study in France induces in the lives of my students. Vive la différence!
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Send Questions to Elizabeth Locey, Program Director
Last Updated: 11/27/00