Biography & Awards

Dr. Courtney Sullivan was born in Wichita, KS and attended grade school and high school in Dallas, TX. She majored in French and Communications at Loyola University in New Orleans, LA. She studied in Angers, France at the Université Catholique de l'Ouest in the summer of 1991 and attended Alma College's French Program in Paris in the fall of 1991. After she finished her B.A. at Loyola University, she taught English at a private language school in Prague, Czech Republic for a year. She received an M.A. in French Literature from the University of Texas in August 1996. During the following year, she taught English as an assistante de langue in Paris and attended Paris III. While completing her Ph.D. at the University of Texas, she worked in the French Department as an assistant instructor and supervisor of accelerated first-year French. She was also employed as a lecturer in the Department of English at Paris XIII the academic year of 1999-2000. The University of Texas awarded her a Ph.D. in May 2003. In the summer of 2006, she completed a month-long workshop for teachers of French at the Alliance Française in Paris and in June 2008, she traveled to Québec to attend the Université Feministe d’été at the Université Laval.

She is a nineteenth-century specialist and is certified to teach business French. Her dissertation examines representations of the courtesan in the nineteenth-century novel and in the autobiographical writings by demi-mondaines. In addition to nineteenth-century literature, she also enjoys film studies (filmic adaptations of French novels and post-colonial works), Francophone women writers, gender studies, and cultural studies. She loves to travel, dance salsa and tango, swim, and go to the cinema. She is very happy to be back in Kansas and enjoys not only teaching French language, but also organizing fun extracurricular events at Washburn like the Table française (a French conversation table attended by Washburn students, native speakers of French, and Francophone members of the community) and Alliance Française. She led a group of Washburn students abroad on a Best of France study tour in the summer of 2005.