Assistant Professor of French
BA, St. Lawrence University; MA, Texas Tech University; PhD, Brown University
Email: knharrington@plymouth.edu
Dr. Katharine Harrington teaches a wide range of French language, culture, literature and film courses.
She received her BA from St. Lawrence University with a double major in French and Government. While at St. Lawrence, she spent her junior year studying abroad in Rouen, France. Upon graduating from college, she spent a year in Ecuador teaching English and learning Spanish. She completed a Master’s degree in Romance Languages at Texas Tech University and earned her PhD in French Studies from Brown University in 2005. During her doctoral program, she spent two years in Lyon, France teaching English at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. Her dissertation examines the nomadic experience of bilingual, bicultural writers in contemporary French and Francophone literature.
Prior to coming to PSU in the fall of 2010, she taught for six years at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, a small campus on the Canadian border where she became interested in North American Francophone communities, particularly in New England and the teaching of French to heritage language learners. While at Fort Kent, she organized an annual French film festival and created an afterschool French program at Fort Kent Elementary School.
Dr. Harrington has published articles on the writings of Nancy Huston and Régine Robin as well as nomadism in contemporary Francophone literature. She has also co-edited a collection of effective instructional strategies for the second language classroom entitled Recipes for Success in Foreign Language Teaching: Ready-made Activities for the L2 Classroom. Her current scholarly interests include contemporary French, Québécois and Francophone literature, French and Québécois film, and innovative language pedagogy.
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