Founding Director and Professor of French

Photo by: Christian Hommel Photography

Since 1990, as Founding Director of the UVa Teaching Resource Center, Marva Barnett works with excellent faculty and TAs from throughout the University. Her current TRC projects include designing and directing the Hybrid Challenge grants program (in collaboration with President Sullivan and the Faculty Senate), overseeing the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorships, chairing the University-wide Teaching Awards Committee, and serving on the Excellence in Diversity Fellows Program Advisory Committee. She is proud of having received the Thomas Jefferson Award, the Elizabeth Zintl Award for Leadership, and the Excellence in Faculty Mentoring Award. Marva's pedagogical interests include helping students develop as lifelong learners, engaging them in defining their interests and goals, and helping them become critical thinkers, researchers, and good writers.

Marva's own research projects have ranged from baroque French theater to second-language acquisition work on reading and writing, to Victor Hugo's works. She is currently working on a book about Les Misérables. For her work in promoting French language, culture, and literature, the French Government named her chevalier de l'Ordre des palmes académiques. She has published in The French Review, The Modern Language Journal, and Foreign Language Annals, among other journals. Her interest in the importance of reflective thinking in humanities led her to accept the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellowship at Downing College, University of Cambridge (2000). Particularly committed to connecting her research and teaching, Marva is gratified to have received the Pimsleur Award for research and the Freeman Award for pedagogy.

With roots in both Virginia and Utah, Marva Barnett completed her B.A. in French and English at Westminster College, Salt Lake City. After completing her M.A. thesis on the theme of love in chosen works of Victor Hugo at the University of Maine at Orono, she specialized in seventeenth-century French tragicomedy for her Ph.D. work at Harvard University. Always interested in teaching as well as research, Marva accepted positions involving training and supervising graduate teaching assistants (TAs) in French at Purdue University and Indiana University before settling at the University of Virginia.

Selected Publications:

• Lettres inédites de Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo. With Gérard Pouchain. Rouen & Le Havre: Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2012.
• Victor Hugo on Things That Matter: A Reader. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
• Co-author with Dorothe Bach, José Fuentes and Sherwood Frey: “Promoting Intellectual Community and Professional Growth for Diverse Faculty.” Sandra Chadwick-Blossey, ed., To Improve the Academy: Resources for Faculty, Instructional, and Organizational Development.  Vol. 24. Bolton, MA: Anker, 2006: 166-82.
  “Whose Course Is It? Students as Course Co-Creators.” Margaret-Ann Kassen, ed., Language Learners of Tomorrow: Process and Promise. Report of the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook, 1999: 61-97.
• More Than Meets the Eye—Foreign Language Reading: Theory and Practice. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1989.
• Lire avec plaisir: Stratégies de lecture and Instructor’s Manual. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Second edition: Boston: Heinle, 1992.

TRC Publications:

• “Lost in the Crowd? Helping Individual Students,” Teaching Concerns, Fall 2001.
• “Promoting Students’ Intellectual Growth,” Teaching Concerns, Fall 2000.
  
• “On the Same Wave Length? Clarifying Course Expectations and Goals,” Teaching Concerns, Fall 1999.
  
• Co-authored and co-edited with Marjorie Lindner: Teaching at the University of Virginia:  A Handbook for Faculty and Teaching Assistants.  Charlottesville, VA:  Univ. of Virginia Board of Visitors, 1991.

Selected Grants Received:

• Page-Barbour Funds ($15,000) from Arts & Sciences in support of “ ‘When Freedom Returns...’: Exile for Victor Hugo and Other Engagé Writers,” Department of French Müller Colloquium, University of Virginia, April 2010.
  
• Arts & Sciences Research Support in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Grant, University of Virginia, for archival research for on letters from Juliette Drouet to Victor Hugo, 2008.
  
• NEH Special Challenge Grant ($300,000) to create and endow three Distinguished Teaching Professorships, 1992.
  
• Lilly Teaching Fellows Program ($150,000) to support curriculum development and teaching improvement of junior faculty, 1992. Program continued as the University Teaching Fellows Program.

Recent Courses Taught:

• Interpreting Les Misérables, USEM 1580
• Victor Hugo: poète, dramaturge, romancier, critique social, artiste (FREN 3655) (username & password = hugolien)
• The Writing and Reading of Texts (FREN 3032)
• Marva’s Teaching Portfolio