Pierce Lockett

Pierce is third-year doctoral student in the Department of French. His research interests include contemporary French and Francophone fiction and cinema’s ongoing conversation with architecture, urban studies, and the built environment. His proposed dissertation aims to investigate the ways that contemporary literary and filmic texts reflect on the built structures that shape lived experience, cultural memory, and aesthetic practice in contemporary France. Pierce is also pursuing a graduate certificate in the Digital Humanities.

Prior to UVa, Pierce served as the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at Muhlenberg College. Most recently, he worked as a lecteur at l’Université de Paris-Est Créteil (l’UPEC) for the 2024–2025 academic year.

Education:

MA, French, University of Virginia (2023)

BA, summa cum laude, English and French & Francophone Studies, Muhlenberg College (2019)

Courses Taught:

UVA: FREN 1020 (Fall 2023/Spring 2024), FREN 2016 (Summer 2024)

UPEC: All levels of anglais oral in the license d’anglais (Fall 2024 and Spring 2025)

Conference Presentations:

“Freaking out the neighborhood: reading the zone pavillonaire in Julia Deck’s Propriété privée (2019)”, Society for French Studies 2025 Conference, June 30-July 2, 2025

“Free From the Stacks: Formal Independence in Aurélien Bellanger’s Le Vingtième siècle”. 20th and 21st Century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium, February 22-24, 2024

Prizes and Awards:

2024 Richard Guy Wilson Prize for Excellence in the Study of Buildings, Landscapes and Places, “Building Babel at the Bibliothèque Nationale: Finding Aurélien Bellanger’s Le vingtième siècle (The Twentieth Century), 2023”