Educational Background
Maîtrise de Lettres Modernes from Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-III (1995) with a thesis on the French-Canadian writer Antonine Maillet called : “La tradition orale dans l’oeuvre d’Antonine Maillet” (the oral tradition in Antonine Maillet’s works), received Cum Laude.
Ph.D. in French Studies from Louisiana State University (2007), specialization in French sociolinguistics. Dissertation entitled “Français acadien, français cadien: variation stylistique et maintenance de formes phonétiques dans le parler de quatre générations de femmes cadiennes” (Acadian French, Cajun French: stylistic variation and maintenance pf phonetic forms in the speech of four generations of Cajun women). Degree awarded with the congratulations of the jury.
Scholarly Interests
Dr. Carole Salmon’s research focuses on Cajun French. Her areas of study are sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. She analyzes linguistic and stylistic variation (maintenance and change) as well as linguistic attitudes in the speech of French speaking men versus women.
Her work is based on the1997 Dubois Cajun French Corpus, an audio database of 120 Cajun French speakers. She also works on manuscripts written in French in Louisiana during the 18th and 19th century. She is the co-author of six published articles and she presented to a dozen of national and international conferences.
Bio Sketch
Dr. Carole Salmon was born in France in 1973. After obtaining a «Maîtrise de lettres modernes» in 1995 at Paris III, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris, France), she spent a year at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y, as a French Teaching Fellow.
After receiving her teacher’s certification in France (CAPES), she taught French literature and grammar in high school for a few years before coming back to the United States in August of 2001. She received her Ph.D. in French Studies with distinction from Louisiana State University in May 2007 and is currently an assistant professor of French Studies and Culture in the department of Cultural Studies at UMass Lowell.