Associate Professor, Languages, Cultures and Literatures
- PhD and MA, University of California Santa Barbara, French Literature
- Graduate Certificate in Applied Linguistics
- BA, SUNY Binghamton, French Literature
Eliza Jane Smith, PhD, joined the faculty in 2019. She teaches French language at all levels and offers courses in literature, culture and Business French. She is a specialist of French culture and literature in the long nineteenth-century (1789–1914). Additional areas of expertise include sociocultural linguistics and second-language acquisition.
Scholarly Work
Professor Smith’s primary research focuses on representations of language and identity in nineteenth-century French literature. She is the author of Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France (Lexington Books, 2021), which reveals how the use of slang in French literature and culture led to the emergence of a sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class life and culture in a way that expanded class boundaries and increased visibility for minorities within the public sphere. Additional research has been published in journals such as Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Médias 19. She has also published chapters in these peer-reviewed volumes: Marginal Paris: Representing the Shadows of the City of Light (Brill 2024) and Nontraditional and Innovative Approaches to Teaching Culture in the French Language Classroom (Lever Press 2022).
She is currently working on an article for a special volume of Women in French Studies on Alternate Realities that analyzes representations of the uncanny in two French horror films: Les Yeux sans visage (1960) and Titane (2024).
Areas of Interest
Professor Smith’s teaching interests include Criminal Paris, French Fashion, Horror and the Occult and Business French, in addition to both pre-modern and modern survey literature courses, introduction to literary analysis and cultural backgrounds of France.