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Williams Hosts Exhibit on the French in New England - March 18, 2008
WILLIAMSTOWN - The Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Williams College will host an exhibit themed "Le français en Nouvelle-Angleterre: The French Language in New England & Notes from the Franco-American French Project." The exhibit will be on display in the lobby of Weston Hall on the Williams campus from March 31 to April 25. It premiered last summer at the Jacob Edwards Library in Southbridge, Mass.
To mark the official opening, project author Cynthia Fox, associate professor of French studies at the University at Albany (SUNY- Albany), will deliver a lectured titled "C'est pas mal la manière qu'on parlait: Franco-American perspectives on the French language in New England" on Wednesday, April 2, at 4:15 p.m. in Weston Hall, room 10. Both the lecture and the exhibit are free and open to the public.
Funded by a National Science Foundation grant, the Franco-American French Project is a collaborative, multi-year study of eight New England communities with high proportions of French Canadian ancestry.
Through interviews with 275 French speakers in these communities -- Southbridge and Gardner, Mass.; Bristol, Conn.; Woonsocket, R.I.; Van Buren, Waterville and Biddeford, Maine; and Berlin, N.H. -- the project revealed that although actual numbers of French speakers are decreasing, the language is still vital in the daily lives of these speakers.
Although Williamstown was not specifically targeted in the project, it is one of several towns in northwestern Massachusetts, which attracted French Canadian and Acadian immigrants during the so-called "grande migration" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Fox and Jane Canova, the director of the center, have incorporated material about these communities into the exhibit. The display will include photographs and artifacts on loan from the Williamstown House of Local History. |
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