About the Director:

Victoria Lodewick, or Tori, as friends know her, has been Director of the University Scholars Program since July 2001. Tori has been connected to Duke for a long time at a variety of levels. She began her career at Duke as an undergraduate, majoring in French and Comparative Area Studies. She left North Carolina for California, enrolling at the University of California Santa Barbara, where she earned her M.A. in French. After leaving California, she moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where she worked as a Clinical Medical Research Coordinator for Phase III and IV clinical trials, engaging a lifelong interest in medicine.

Her passion for literature led her to return to graduate school - and to Duke - to begin a doctoral program in the Department of Romance Studies, where she worked with Professors Alice Kaplan and Jean Jonassaint. In September 2000, she earned her PhD. Her dissertation, entitled "Institutions, Errance, and Ethnography: The African Novels of Three Francophone Caribbean Writers", examines the institutional impact on the construction of the writerly self and on writerly production in three generations of Caribbean writers, René Maran, Roger Dorsinville, and Maryse Condé, who each lived and worked for extended periods of time in Africa. It traces the connection between their institutional formation, their errancy, and their ethnographic fictional discourse on Africa via an interdisciplinary approach through literature, history, sociology, and anthropology. Her thesis project allowed her to travel to France, Martinique, and Senegal to conduct research, a trajectory similar to the journeys of the authors whom she studied.

Tori has taught numerous courses in French language, on French culture, on plagiarism in francophone literature, on Caribbean women writers, and on African childhood narratives.

Contact:  victoria.lodewick@duke.edu

About the previous director