Faculty & Staff
Aymeric Glacet 
Associate Professor of French and French Studies
Aymeric Glacet is Associate Professor of French and French Studies. He joined the Sewanee faculty in 2003. His areas of specialization are twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone literature, and visual culture. He received a Ph.D. from Emory University in May 2003, and obtained the degree of Docteur ès lettres from Lille 3 University (France) in December 2004. This research led to the publication of a book entitled Claude Simon Chronophotographe ou les onomatopées du temps at the University Press of Septentrion in May 2007.
Professor Glacet teaches language courses at all levels from French 103 to French 300, and it gives him great pleasure to stimulate his students’ interest in majoring or minoring in either French or French Studies. By articulating the relationship between language, culture, and literature, he teaches students to use their linguistic competence to appreciate the cultural and literary texts that he presents to them. The Department of French and French Studies has two tracks, and Professor Glacet teaches in both. In French, his specialization is twentieth-century French literature (prose, theatre, poetry, and literary criticism), but he also teaches early French literature; in French Studies, he teaches the history of French cinema as well as Francophone culture and literature of North Africa and the Caribbean.
Kathryn O. Mills
Associate Professor of French and French Studies
An Echols Scholar and holder of the Honor Award Scholarship at the University of Virginia, Kathryn Oliver Mills studied French, German and English Literature for a B.A. in Comparative Literature. She then worked at a San Francisco corporate law-firm for a year before pursuing French Literature at St. John's College of Oxford University. After earning a B.A./M.A. in French Literature at St. John's she completed her studies for a Ph.d. at Yale University with a dissertation on Baudelaire's prose poetry vis à vis his poems in verse. Her primary interests lie in poetry, the stylistics of poetry and prose, nineteenth-century formal experimentation, and the problems of genre definition. Dr. Mills taught at the University of Texas Pan-American, Belmont University, and Vanderbilt University before starting at Sewanee in 1997. She has published articles on Baudelaire as well as reviews, and she is now researching the relationship between Baudelaire and Christianity.
George W. Poe
Professor of French and French Studies and Class of 1961 Chair of the College
Professor Poe joined the Sewanee faculty in December of 1987, after previous teaching experience at Davidson College and Hanover College, and chaired Sewanee's Department of French from 1994 to 2000, overseeing the implementation of the Department's second major/minor program in French Studies. He has also been the Department's study-abroad advisor through the years and founded Sewanee's biennial Summer-in-France program in 1988; and, more broadly, he has served on the boards of several study-in-France programs. He also served as Visiting Director and Scholar in Residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, in fall 1995, after having earlier been a Fellow there. Professor Poe specializes in eighteenth-century French literature, having published a book on the writing of the period and on the playwright Marivaux in particular. He also coedited and contributed to a later book on the French novel and has published numerous articles and reviews in American and French journals. On the French Studies side of the Department's curriculum, he also teaches French civilization and modern French culture and has directed the senior seminar on multiple occasions. Professor Poe was honored as the 2004 "Teacher of the Year" by the Society of Sewanee Scholars and was later recognized by the Carnegie Foundation and by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education as the 2006 U.S. Professor of the Year for the state of Tennessee.
Laurie A. Ramsey
Associate Professor of French and French Studies
Laurie Ramsey attended the College of William and Mary, where she majored in French and minored in Music, participating in many musical events. She was Concertmaster of the College-Community Orchestra. She spent did her junior year abroad in Montpellier, France and lived in the French House at the College for two years. Professor Ramsey then went to Indiana University having been offered a position as Associate Instructor as she pursued her M.A. and Ph.D. in French Linguistics. Her dissertation, "The Acquisition of French Intonation by American Learners," combined her interests in second language acquisition and prosody, the music of language. She was on the IU faculty for two years before moving to Sewanee in 1992. Apart from her teaching in the Department of French and French Studies, Professor Ramsey enjoys playing violin in the University Orchestra and the Trio ma non troppo, walking, traveling, and participating in interdisciplinary activities on campus. Her current research project is entitled "A Teacher’s Guide to Alsace."
Donald C. Rung III
Associate Professor of French and French Studies
Donald Rung was inspired by a seventh-grade French teacher, Mrs. Kasmala, to continue French in high school and college, but unable to commit himself to a single subject, majored in History and Literature of England and France. At Harvard, a seminar given by Anna Cancogni exposed him to the beauties of French structuralist criticism, the study of which he pursued at the University of Hawaii and then Princeton. At Princeton he wrote his dissertation on Descartes' use of classical rhetoric, a subject that he continues to research. Other research interests include emblematics and, most recently, the place of money in the transition to the modern age. Coming to Sewanee directly from the Northeast, where he grew up, he has fallen in love with the natural beauty of Sewanee's environment and the warmth of its people. He enjoys playing sports, playing the guitar, reading science fiction, and accompanying his children on their journey to adulthood.
