I’d heard about the North American Francophone Podcast but hadn’t listened to it until yesterday. It’s great! The host, Dr. Claire-Marie Brisson, explores Francophone North America (in English), speaking with academics, poets, musicians, farmers, students, playwrights, and others, on topics that range from sustainable farming to language to filmmaking to identity. Her interviews are relaxed, conversational, thoughtful, and easy to follow.
Dr. Brisson, born in Dearborn, Michigan, teaches French at Harvard University in Massachusetts, has family connections in Québec, and spent some time as a bilingual intern in the Canadian Senate in 2011. In 2014, she went to Avignon, France as a National Endowment for the Humanities graduate student scholar.
Passionate about studying and teaching languages, Dr. Brisson is fluent in French and English and speaks German, Latin, some Italian, Russian, Hindi, and Chinese. She hopes to become proficient in at least 15 languages.
I encourage you to listen to Dr. Brisson’s The Weight of Language: Voicing the Francophonie in English episode. She describes how she is reclaiming English as “a space of sharing between Anglophone and Francophone topics.”
Image: Image: Dr. Claire-Marie Brisson at Harvard, from her Twitter account
Catherine Fisher, blogger
