EAST LANSING, Mich. — Two Michigan State University language professors have received the French government’s highest honor for academic achievement, an award that was established by Napoleon in 1808.
Anna Norris and Ehsan Ahmed, both of the MSU Department of French, Classics and Italian, have been named Chevaliers dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Knights in the Order of Academic Palms), a decoration given to those who have advanced the cause of French culture, education and the arts throughout the world. The Palmes Académiques is one of the oldest and most prestigious decorations a scholar can receive from the French government.
Norris teaches 19th- and 20th-century French literature, cinema and visual arts. She is the author of “L’Ecriture du défi: les texts carcéraux féminins du 19e et du 20e siècles, entre l’aiguille et la plume” (“Defiant Texts: Women’s Prison Writings of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Centuries, Between Domesticity and Authorship”) (Summa Publications, 2003) and the editor, with Frédérique Chevillot, of a new collection of essays titled “Des femmes écrivent la guerre” (“Women Writing War”) (Editions Complicités, 2006), which focuses on the responses of French and Francophone women to the experience of war in the 20th century. She received a doctorate in French from the University of Virginia in 1994 and joined MSU in 1999.
“I feel honored to have received such a prestigious award,” says Norris, who directed MSU’s study abroad program in Tours, France, for five years. “I am particularly thrilled that the French government values its culture and language enough to make the effort to monitor and acknowledge individuals’ work in the humanities.”
Ahmed, who joined MSU in 1995, teaches French intellectual history and literature. He is the author of “Clément Marot: The Mirror of the Prince” (Rookwood Press, 2005) and “The Law and the Song: Hebraic, Christian, and Pagan Revivals in Sixteenth-Century France” (Summa Publications, 1997). He received a doctorate in romance languages and literatures from Princeton University in 1987.
“I am deeply moved by this honor,” Ahmed says. “Teaching Renaissance French literature has given me the opportunity to engage critically with students about the ways in which we lead our lives. It’s wonderful to be recognized for something so pleasurable.”
Norris and Ahmed are the fifth and sixth MSU faculty members to be awarded the Palmes Académiques. Previous winners include Deidre Dawson, Michael Koppisch, Jean Nicholas and Georges Joyaux.
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