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Charles O'Keefe

Affiliation:Emeriti
Title:Professor Emeritus of French
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B.A. from St. Peter's College
Ph.D. from Duke University

I went to graduate school in French just to get a better grip on French and French literature, discovered much to my surprise that I really enjoyed teaching, and haven’t stepped away from the classroom since. During my 35 plus years at Denison, I was fortunate enough to teach courses I really wanted to teach across the French curriculum, as well as in the Honors and First Year Seminar programs. In the process I was privileged to receive the Distinguished Teaching Award. 

I’ve also been encouraged to pursue a fairly idiosyncratic research agenda by the intellectual freedom fostered by Denison as a liberal arts college.  What that has meant for me is that, since we teachers require students to take courses ranging over different disciplines, I've felt it appropriate for my interests as a French teacher/scholar to range over my field’s writers and centuries in a variety of ways. So my research has led to books and articles in French and Francophone literature from the 17th to the 21st century using a variety of critical approaches, some of them that try to stretch disciplinary boundaries. For example, my current research is producing a manuscript offering a comparative study of the bronze-age Greek epic poem The Odyssey and a 1968 “postmodern” French novel, Patrick Modiano’s La place de l’étoile. 

Although I’ve been Chair and Associate Chair of Modern Languages on three occasions, and at various times a member of a wide variety of committees and task forces, the highlights of my extracurricular involvement at Denison have been working with students, for instance as part of the Denison Service Orientation in Washington DC (“DSO is an intense direct-service experience designed to help incoming students adjust to college, build strong friendships, and realize the possibilities available to them at Denison”), and Denison’s Sophomore Quest (“Working with older students, staff, and a motivational speaker, QUEST encourages participants to think creatively about their personal, professional and civic lives”).

View Professor O'Keefe's personal webpage

 

For more information, contact Cheryl Johnson.


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