French Alumna Donates to Support Doctoral Students
Dr. Liliane Willens, a 1974 alumna from our graduate program in French Language & Literature, has generously provided us with a $5,000 grant to aid our French doctoral students with both research and professional development.
Romance Studies Chair Odile Cazenave is grateful to Willens for her gift, saying “This is a wonderful way to be giving back and helping the next generation become even more accomplished.”
Willens was born of Russian Jewish parentage in the former French Concession of Shanghai, China. She and her family experienced World War II in China under Japanese military occupation. They remained in China during the Chinese civil war and, after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, for the first two years of the People’s Republic of China. Willens has written about this experience in her book Stateless in Shanghai, published in 2010.
After Willens emigrated to the United States, she studied at Boston University where she earned a doctorate in French Language and Literature, writing a dissertation titled Voltaire’s Comic Theater: Composition & Conflict. Post-graduation, Willens taught French language and literature classes at both Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.