When Michelle Mielly recently had the opportunity to pay a surprise visit to her former professors and classmates now working at Southwestern, it was a rare break from what has become a busy year. A Harvard doctoral candidate, she is immersed in researching and writing her dissertation while teaching undergraduate classes, raising her two-year-old son, Robin, and expecting a second child in July.

Mielly is due to complete her Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures in June 2004. Her dissertation is on 20th century French and Francophone literature, specifically focusing on the woman writer and social activist Werewere Liking from the Ivory Coast, West Africa. "I'm taking a cross-disciplinary look at issues of development; how women writers address issues of development and how culture can be a vector for development."

She currently is working with Liking to help plan an inter-university tour of the Northeast with a group of artists. "Liking has created a village cooperative in Abidjan, where 70 artists live, give lessons and put on shows. Because the Ivory Coast is currently on the verge of civil war, tourism is down so she's bringing her troupe to the United States for performances."

Meanwhile, Mielly teaches undergraduate survey classes in French and Francophone literature at Harvard. She has been teaching ever since graduating from Southwestern in 1990, beginning with an English as a second language course in Grenoble, France while earning an ESL teaching degree. She continued her graduate studies the next year at Penn State, earning a Master's in Comparative Literature. She spent 1994-1995 working in Costa Rica and working with writer Ana Istarù for the translation of her poetry.

After returning to the United States for a brief time working in journalism, Mielly went to France and taught in the engineering school of the University of Grenoble for the next three years. In 1999, she was accepted to the Ph.D. program at Harvard. "It's taken me all this time teaching and traveling to decide what I wanted. But I still believe that if it weren't for my incredible undergraduate experience at Southwestern, I wouldn't be here."

Mielly came to Southwestern from Katy and decided to pursue a French major with a minor in Spanish. "I was wonderfully spoiled by my professors who believed in me. Sonia Riquelme (Professor of Spanish) mentored me in ways I can't imagine happening here at Harvard. She was a real force in my professional trajectory. People like Weldon Crowley, Edward Kain, Jan Dawson or Star Varner also stand out in my mind as significant influences in my early academic career. The most important thing that Southwestern instilled in me was a critical mode of looking at the world. It's important for students to articulate their ideas and challenge what they read, see and hear, especially today."

Mielly is married to Antoine Kevorkian, a French physicist she met in 1996 while teaching at Grenoble. She is an outdoors and nature enthusiast who enjoys cross-country skiing, mountain biking and wind surfing. She practices yoga and would like to get certified as an Iyengar yoga instructor. She writes poetry for fun, with several works having been published in journals.

After completing her graduate work, she would like to teach in a university and help writers by promoting their work in that setting or work for a cultural development organization. "I can see myself doing more anthropological work with writers in West Africa or Latin America. I hope to help raise funds for writers and artists from these regions so that they can be published for wider audiences, which would allow them to stay in their own countries and continue their work locally while gaining the much-deserved recognition they need for survival."