New Faculty Profiles
I strive to be both nurturing and demanding at once, asking the students to master skills of increasing complexity that will build their confidence and invariably serve them outside the classroom.
Priya Wadhera
Assistant Professor, Department of Languages and International Studies
wadhera@adelphi.edu
Please give us a brief overview of your background, area of expertise, research, and teaching.
I came to Adelphi from Columbia University, where I earned my Ph.D., then served as a lecturer in the Department of French and Romance Philology and as the director of the Maison Française. In the spring of 2003, I was honored with a presidential award for outstanding teaching by a graduate student for combining “intellectual rigor, innovative teaching methods, personal warmth, and individual attention to foster an environment that encourages learning.” My doctoral dissertation focused on works of art in the œuvre of Georges Perec, a topic on which I have published and been invited to speak. This interest in art in a literary context dates from my master’s thesis on ekphrasis in Proust written at Bryn Mawr College, where I majored in comparative literature and earned a joint A.B./M.A. in French.
What led you to choose Adelphi?
I have benefited from great teachers over the years and the emphasis placed on excellence in teaching at Adelphi, working closely with students in a relatively small community, appealed to me very much. The opportunity to boost interest and enrollment in French is also one I value. Additionally, I am grateful for the University’s generous support of my research.
What has been your experience thus far?
So far, I have been impressed by the dedication and the dynamism of the faculty and by the students who are eager to learn and curious about the world.
What do you want to contribute? What do you feel strongly about in teaching or in your specialization?
For my love of teaching French, I am indebted to many extraordinary teachers who imbued me with a sense of appreciation for the language and literature of the Francophone world. Their energy fuels my own teaching today. My objective is to create a comfortable and challenging environment in which my students and I can work as a team toward a common goal, whether this be language acquisition or literary analysis.
In my courses, I utilize a communicative approach and focus on students’ varying skills, needs, and interests, introducing elements of French and Francophone culture with film, the Internet, and other media. Whether students listen to the voice of a poet reading her own poetry, view a painting inspired by a literary text, or research the socio-historical context of a work, they become more familiar with the language and the culture from which it springs. I strive to be both nurturing and demanding at once, asking the students to master skills of increasing complexity that will build their confidence and invariably serve them outside the classroom. While participation is welcomed, assignments must be done and ideas supported by the text at hand.
What do you wish to impart to your students?
Whether I teach language or literature, I aim not only to return the favor of instructors before me and share the passion I have inherited for this field, but to demonstrate how each of us can make what we learn our own through experience. I maintain that a foreign language is a lens through which students can more clearly view the world around them, but that they must work for this privilege. Exposure to the "foreign" reminds us of who we are and of how similar we are to others, despite superficial differences. This philosophy is at the core of my experience at Exeter, Bryn Mawr, Columbia, and now Adelphi. In imparting this understanding to my students, I hope both to widen horizons and to make the world seem just a bit smaller. And should the students learn to love French in the process, all the better. 
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