Lionel Cuillé is a teaching professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the director of the French Connexions Cultural Center.
The French Connexions Cultural Center was recognized in 2019 as part of the prestigious network of centers of excellence of the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., hosted by the top 15 research universities in the United States. I created the center with the mission to promote and interpret Francophone culture in all its diversity. Thanks to the partnership established with the cultural services of the French Embassy, the center has hosted renowned writers, as was the case with David Diop, a French-Senegalese writer who received the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens as well as the prestigious International Booker Prize in 2021 for his novel Frères d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black), which recounts the trauma of a Senegalese rifleman during World War I.
The cultural center’s activities are not limited to the literary field, however. For example, with the financial support of the French Embassy, the center organized an international symposium on the video game industry in Quebec, attended by a wide range of representatives of this dynamic industry, as well as a significant number of students who are majoring in computer science and French. As such, the center intends to demonstrate the added value of French studies for WashU students in science and the social sciences in particular, since a double major in French opens up new professional opportunities and internships in the Francophone world. In collaboration with Career Services, the center organizes professional forums where students can meet alumni who have completed a double major in French and who work in all areas of the industry. Hence the success, for example, of the “French Studies for STEM” event, where WashU medical students were able to share why internships at the Pasteur Hospital in Nice allowed them to internationalize their pre-med studies and increase their chances of getting into medical school.
