Graduate Student Exchange

In the fall of 2016 the LSU Center for French and Francophone Studies and the Université des Antilles were awarded a $235,000 grant by the Partner University Fund (cultural services of the French embassy in the United States), the FACE Foundation (French American Cultural Exchange, New York) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This funding was used to host an international colloquium at LSU in November 2016 entitled "Louisiana/French Antilles: A Shared Space Time" and to establish a graduate student exchange between LSU and the Université des Antilles.

In November 2016 five graduate students from the Université des Antilles traveled to Louisiana to collaborate with four LSU graduate students in researching the topic "Slavery in the Caribbean Basin" at Whitney Plantation. Now, in April 2017, those four LSU graduate students will be heading to the French Caribbean to conduct research on a similar topic. First, the students will go to Martinique where they will meet with world-renowned scholars and writers on the campus of Université des Antilles in Fort-de-France. Then, they will go to Guadeloupe to perform archival research at the Memorial ACTe, a unique cultural institution that is part of the UNESCO's Slave Route Project.

The purpose of this graduate student exchange is to establish cultural, linguistic, historical, and academic connections between the islands of the French Caribbean and Louisiana.