Staff of Lewiston’s French-language newspaper Le Messager, circa 1910. From “The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn,” courtesy of the University of Southern Maine, Franco-American Collection.

Even though �ֲ���ý professor Mary Rice-DeFosse and James Myall have studied Lewiston-Auburn’s Franco-American community for years, it can still surprise them.

While researching their new book, The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn (The History Press), the first comprehensive history of this community written for a general audience, they encountered a few shocks.

“There were lots of little details that were hidden even to people who had looked at that history for quite a long time,” says Myall, former coordinator of the University of Southern Maine’s Franco-American Collection and now executive director of the Freeport Historical Society.

One of the biggest bombshells (“I have trouble just picking one,” he says) came from early 20th-century local newspaper accounts of Franco-American children playing in the city dump in Little Canada (Lewiston’s Franco-American neighborhood) — a structural reminder of the discrimination and oppression new immigrant groups often face.

The authors were not the only ones to be surprised by the stories the book uncovered. “Although Franco-Americans are proud of their history, they don’t know how much they have to be proud of,” says Rice-DeFosse, a professor of French and Francophone studies.

• On April 27, 2015, Rice-DeFosse will be one of three faculty from Maine colleges and universities to receive the Maine Campus Compact’s Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence. “Her community-engaged work hits the faculty trifecta,” says �ֲ���ý Harward Center director Darby Ray, “as it involves substantial service to the off-campus community, innovative pedagogy and published scholarship.” In 2014, Rice-DeFosse was inducted into the Maine Franco-American Hall of Fame.

Myall and Rice-DeFosse saw a need for the book within the Franco-American community, to share with its members the details of their rich history, but they also wrote the book for a wider audience, to cast doubt on popularly held beliefs about immigrant identity and assimilation in America.

Sylvia and Rosaire Roy at WCOU Studios on Lisbon Street, Lewiston, circa 1945. From “The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn,” courtesy of the University of Southern Maine, Franco-American Collection.

“We have a notion of the American melting pot: immigrants come, the first generation doesn’t speak any English, the second generation learns English and the third generation is assimilated,” Rice-DeFosse says. “And Maine’s Franco-Americans do not follow that pattern.”

Instead, Rice-Defosse and Myall reveal in their book an extraordinarily resilient community of Americans who have managed to preserve their French and French-Canadian roots since they started to arrive in the Twin Cities in the mid-19th century to work in the Androscoggin River mills.

The chapters, organized chronologically, are divided into short sections that cover material spanning arts (early 20th-century Lewiston was once dubbed the “Athens of French America”), festivals (like the 1925 snowshoe convention/”beer fest” held openly during Prohibition) and religion — the Church of SS Peter and Paul, an iconic building of the Lewiston-Auburn skyline, was built by 1936 on the “nickels and dimes” of faithful Franco-American parishioners. (It was reclassified as a basilica in 2005.)

A child at an unknown textile mill in Lewiston, circa 1900. From “The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn,” courtesy of the University of Southern Maine, Franco-American Collection.

The book proceeds into the present, finishing with the reaction of the Franco-American community to the influx of African refugees (some of whom speak French) and the gubernatorial race between incumbent Paul LePage and U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud — two Franco-American candidates. “We really took it right up to the wire, considering we were writing about things that were happening the week before,” Myall says.

The co-authors, who had previously worked together on the board of the Franco-American Collection, enjoyed the collaboration. “We complemented each other nicely between a historical perspective — my primary interest — and Mary’s interest in the language and culture,” Myall says.

Myall and Rice-DeFosse brought to the book research that dovetailed to form a complete portrait of the Franco-American community.

Rice-DeFosse has worked with �ֲ���ý students, particularly those in her course titled “French in Maine,” for years to collect the oral histories of local Franco-American residents. While the interviews started as a way for her students to practice their French language in the community, they evolved into an indispensable source of history.

“I have a record of a number of people’s lives, their life stories…that was the reason we were able to do the book,” Rice-DeFosse says.

Myall brought his knowledge of the huge amounts of information housed in the Franco-American Collection. The collection, the University of Southern Maine’s store of Franco-American archival material (and one of the largest in the state of Maine), contains a plethora of primary sources — old newspapers, diaries, recipe books and thousands of images. Most are donations.

“We really appreciate [that] the information we were getting came mostly from the community in one form or another,” Myall says.

That is what makes The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn not only a compelling read for American history buffs, but a source of empowerment for the community itself.

“A lot of people say, ‘Thank you for recognizing our history and writing down these things that we all knew, but nobody has written down before,'” says Myall of reactions to the book. “But then there’s also another group of people — or the same group of people — who sometimes say, ‘This is great; I never even knew this about my own heritage.'”

The potential audience for this book extends well beyond the Lewiston-Auburn city limits. Myall encourages anyone from Maine and New England, a region rich in Franco-American influence, to read about this important population.

Rice-DeFosse sees connections in this history for the study of all people who live in border communities, “who in fact are fully American, in every sense, but who also have retained culture and sometimes language over generations.”

Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies, gives the Kroepsch Lecture on March 18, 2015. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

What shapes a meaningful conversation with people whose sense of self has been fractured by witnessing the horrors of genocide? In such conversations, who controls what is meaningful and worthy of discussion, remembrance and action?

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, recipient of �ֲ���ý’ 2015 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, devoted his Kroepsch lecture on March 18 to a thorough analysis of those questions — specifically as they pertain to his decade of engaging �ֲ���ý students with survivors and their stories of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

And whether or not he ever used the words “power” and “ownership” during his late-afternoon lecture, those concepts were the floor his talk stood on.

How do power relationships play out in the dialogue between a trauma survivor and that person’s interlocutor? Who owns the survivor’s story, the space in which it’s heard and its retellings? Most important, what is the interlocutor’s ethical and civic obligation to the survivor?

Associate professor in French and francophone studies, Dauge-Roth is internationally known for his research into personal narratives from the genocide, work represented by his 2010 book, Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History (Lexington Books).

Dozens of students, colleagues and friends offered a warm welcome to this scholar and teacher who, in his 10th year at �ֲ���ý, “received many, many nominations for the Kroepsch,” as Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer said in introducing Dauge-Roth.

Recipients of the award are nominated by current students and recent graduates, and the honoree is selected by a panel of recent recipients. Auer quoted a nominator who had taken part in Dauge-Roth’s Short Term course in Rwanda. That person praised Dauge-Roth for teaching not only academic aspects of the genocide, but the “importance of being understanding, nonjudgmental and sensitive with the [Rwandans] we worked with.” (Another nominator drew laughter by calling Dauge-Roth “the thesis adviser I needed, not the thesis adviser I deserved.”)

Dauge-Roth’s talk was titled The Transformative Power of Literary and Testimonial Encounters. Revealing a mentality scrupulous in both its morality and its attention to the ramifications of an idea, the hour-long talk traced an arc from Dauge-Roth’s own studies, in his native Switzerland and at the University of Michigan, to the thinking behind signature courses that he introduced at �ֲ���ý.

Both courses, “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” and “Learning with the Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda,” were driven by interaction between Dauge-Roth’s students and genocide survivors. The latter, a Short Term unit, has twice brought students to Rwanda.

Together, Sarah Bravmann ’12 and Alexis Mutimukunda face a genocide exhibit of human skulls at the Ntarama Memorial in Rwanda during the Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda” in 2009 led by Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies.

As he designed these courses, he recounted, a central issue quickly emerged. “What are the informative — but more importantly the potentially transformative — places, voices and roles, that we as an academic community are willing to offer to members of another community whose history we are studying?”

“My hope was that a polyvocal and decentered mode of teaching would open up challenging spaces of dialogue, inviting students to re-evaluate the borders of academia; to reflect on their civic role when exposed to histories of pain; and to question the understanding, circulation and production of knowledge about others.”

Inspired by research conducted for his graduate degrees, notably his work at Michigan with the personal testimony of people living with AIDS in France, Dauge-Roth focused on the literature of survivors of the genocide — biographies, diaries, oral history and film.

“Interactions with survivors of genocide is not only about the past and grievance but also about sharing laughter within the present despite of it all,” says Dauge-Roth. Here, �ֲ���ý students and survivors of the genocide in Rwanda gather for music and fellowship during Short Term in 2013. The survivors live at Tubeho, a collective of houses in Kigali where orphans of the genocide live in reconstituted families.

It was his dissertation director at Michigan, Professor of Comparative Literature Ross Chambers, who articulated the idea that reading survivors’ literature can’t be a passive act: Listeners, Dauge-Roth learned, need to “develop a critical self-awareness regarding their own agency and inadequacy as they respond to survivors’ stories.”

As he created his Rwanda-based courses for �ֲ���ý, Dauge-Roth drew on three consequential lessons from his graduate work. First, trauma causes what he calls a “fracture within the self,” a break between one’s pre- and post-trauma selves that must be negotiated.

Second, that negotiation is not just personal and internal, but social and cultural. Traumas such as AIDS or the Rwandan genocide become, or reflect, social preoccupations. So society dictates the terms of the discourse around them — often to the detriment of the traumatized, as in the bleak early years of the AIDS crisis, when sufferers were branded as “social parasites.”

“Third, I learned that testimonial literature forces on us a political discussion about the social representation of suffering and our civic role in its unfolding and aftermath,” Dauge-Roth said. Crucially, in the words of literature professor Antoine Compagnon, “what is at stake for us as readers is our willingness to be disturbed by, and ultimately transformed by, our encounter with another’s experience.”

In the audience at Alex Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture were, from left, departmental colleague Kirk Read; Katherine Dauge-Roth, Alex’s wife; and their son, Aymeric Dauge-Roth. (Phyllis Graber-Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As Dauge-Roth said in describing the Short Term course in Rwanda, his hope was to create “a space of encounter that would allow survivors to bear witness, on their own terms, and challenge us, their interlocutors, to explore what it means to be a listening community; and what responses we must forge as their painful histories are passed on to us.”

So what does it take to be a listening community? Dauge-Roth offered three tenets (“I’m French — everything goes by threes,” he joked). First, it requires that we move past pity and compassion, “since these are just part of the strategy for maintaining the status quo.” Second, it means incorporating into our own histories the history of pain that we encounter.

Third, it means that listeners “see themselves as indirect witnesses, whose responsibility is to develop a critical self-awareness regarding their own agency and inadequacy as they respond to survivors’ stories. Learning with the survivors” — not merely from; a key distinction for Dauge-Roth — becomes an “ethical gesture” that makes possible reciprocal relationships between survivors’ histories and our own.

“These courses have taught me and my students,” he concluded, “that listening to testimonies bearing witness to the genocide questions both our willingness to confront disconcerting human behaviors and our sense of cultural hospitality — when hospitality is understood as a transformative interruption of one’s self.”

“Facing the disturbing experience of genocide demands that we identify what role we play, and ought to play differently, in the social recognition and circulation of the histories of pain that community partners share.”

View a video of Alex Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture:

One thing professor Alexandre Dauge-Roth wants his students to take away from his teaching is a better understanding of how their worldview is shaped by their own position, and how understanding the limitations of that position is central to learning how to read and listen without immediately judging the experiences of others.

When students and scholars gain that awareness, they are able to learn with their subjects, instead of learning about them. When that shift occurs, powerful learning and understanding takes place not just in class, but across a person’s life, Dauge-Roth said.

“Sometimes it takes time for students and for me,” he said. “It’s great when, years later, when we are facing an unfamiliar situation, we are able to mobilize or revisit some of the discussions we had together but didn’t fully appreciate at the time.”

NOTE TO READERS: Alexandre Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture, The Transformative Power of Literary and Testimonial Encounters, takes place at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 18, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall.

Dauge-Roth’s ability to coach students in this way is one reason why �ֲ���ý has awarded him the 2015 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, which was established in 1985 by a gift from Robert Kroepsch ’33. Nominated by students and alumni, recipients are selected by a committee of previous years’ winners.

Dauge-Roth, an associate professor of French and francophone studies, will give his Kroepsch Lecture on the “the transformative power of literary and testimonial encounters.” The lecture takes place at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 18, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall.

“What we are learning here is, how do you establish communication or dialogue with people who are telling you their stories when you really cannot fully comprehend what their story is?” Dauge-Roth said. “The exchange of knowledge is not about acquisition but the genuine development of a self-critical understanding of the limits of your own ability to truly hear people with whom you share a common space but cannot identify.”

Dauge-Roth has taken students to Rwanda during Short Term to hear first-person accounts of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and to create collaborative short documentaries with survivors. The fact that he is able to tackle such weighty issues through courses in French and francophone studies is not lost on his current and former students.

“He pushes me to places I didn’t know I could go, academically and emotionally,” said Brenna Callahan ’15 of Milton, Massachusetts. “He makes events from the last century that happened on the other side of the world affect my life on a daily basis … What’s most impressive is that he does all of this while studying and talking about genocide.”

Dauge-Roth was born in Switzerland and came to the United States in 1993 through an exchange program with the University of Michigan, where he earned his doctorate in French literature. He came to �ֲ���ý in 2005 after stints as a visiting professor at both Colby and Bowdoin.

Dauge-Roth said he is drawn to the study of social dynamics and polemical tensions between collective memory and personal trauma because doing so forces him to question and explore his personal role in redefining the cultural and social awareness of experiences and voices that are too often silenced.

‘He pushes me to places I didn’t know I could go’

“The more I began to work on this body of literature, the more I began to question, what is our role as people who have not gone through these experiences?” he said. “What is our ethical and social responsibility in relationship to people who have survived genocide or the AIDS pandemic?”

Winning the 2015 Kroepsch Award is humbling given the great faculty at �ֲ���ý, he said. It’s also validating to be nominated by former students.

“Teaching is a bit of a black box because you don’t know exactly how your teaching is received by students,” he said. Winning the Kroepsch Award reaffirms that “there is a long-term effect between what we talked about, the conversations we had in class and how former students are using the questions we discussed in their daily lives and development.”

In Dauge-Roth’s classroom, “listening, empathy and compassion become crucially academic in a way that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally and personally awakening,” said Cody Tracey ’15 of Baltimore. “Tenderness and care are two of my most preferred attributes in a mentor or a professor, and I owe a lot of thanks to Alex for that realization.”

The award-winning Algerian filmmaker Lyes Salem.

Franco-Algerian filmmaker Lyes Salem will show and discuss two of his films in separate events at �ֲ���ý in March.

An actor and screenwriter as well as director, Salem presents his latest movie, the full-length Man From Oran, at 7 p.m. Sunday, March 1. He offers the 2004 short Cousines at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 5. Both screenings take place in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Open to the public at no cost, the screenings are presented by the Department of French and Francophone Studies with support from the rhetoric and politics departments, the NEH Language Support Fund and the Humanities Lecture Fund. For more information, please call 207-786-6281.

Raised in Algiers, Salem left Algeria for France at age 17, just as Algeria entered a decade of civil war and unrest. In France, he studied acting at the Paris Conservatory and began a successful career as a stage actor.

But over time his attention was drawn back to home, and he returned to Algeria and began to tell the country’s stories through film. His debut was Jean Farès, a short film depicting the complexities experienced by an Algerian man and his French wife as they share their choice for their newborn boy’s name, as each of their families has different expectations.

Salem’s second film, Cousines, follows the same man upon his return to Algeria, where his reunion with a distant cousin has surprising outcomes. The film received France’s César award for Best Short Film in 2005.

In 2008, he wrote and directed his first feature film, Masquerades.

Salem was named best director in the New Horizons competition at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival on the strength of 2014’s The Man From Oran. Salem’s second full-length feature, The Man From Oran examines the years following the Algerian independence movement through the experiences of two friends, one of whom is played by Salem.

In addition to the César award, Salem has received the Dubai International Film Festival’s FIPRESCI Prize and the Muhr Arab Award for best film. As an actor, he has appeared in Munich, District B13 and his own Masquerades, among others.

Maine author Brock Clarke. (Jon Hughes/Photopresse)

As part of �ֲ���ý’ Language Arts Live series, Portland author Brock Clarke reads from his novel The Happiest People in the World at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Amazon’s Best Book of the Month for November 2014, The Happiest People in the World was described by The Wall Street Journal as a “dark and funny satire” that “reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.” Admission to the event is free. For more information, call 207-786-6256.

In Clarke’s witty twist on the spy novel, the titular “happiest people” are the Danes, inventors of such joyous things as Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and the open-faced sandwich. Not everyone is so happy, however, when Danish political cartoonists draw Muhammad in their comics, resulting in arson and assassination attempts — a plotline inspired by real events in Denmark in 2005 and made acutely relevant by the recent attack on the Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo.

A satire in the very essence of the word, the novel follows one of these cartoonists, who is relocated by the CIA to a small town in upstate New York, where almost every resident is a CIA operative.

“This book is a goofball, but a goofball with an edge,” wrote Chicago Tribune reviewer Kathleen Rooney. Its “humor and quirkiness are not ends in themselves, but doors that Clarke uses to open the view out onto a bigger vista: the span of America, unto itself, and in relation to the world.”

Clarke is a professor of English at Bowdoin College. His work has been published in The New York Times, Boston Globe, One Story, New England Review and Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as appearing on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.”

His previous books include the national bestseller An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin Books, 2007) and Exley (Algonquin, 2010), a finalist for the Maine Book Award. The Happiest People in the World is his sixth novel.

Mary Rice-DeFosse, professor of French and Francophone studies. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Community engagement makes �ֲ���ý distinctive — and the Department of French and Francophone Studies has, in turn, found distinctive ways to put that ethos into practice.

“We have a particular opportunity because �ֲ���ý is in a French-speaking community,” says Mary Rice-DeFosse, professor of French and Francophone studies.

Since arriving at �ֲ���ý 30 years ago, Rice-DeFosse has often aligned her curriculum with the interests of that community, one first defined by its French Canadian origins and now influenced by French-speakers from such African nations as Djibouti, Chad and Congo.

Rice-DeFosse’s achievements in community-engaged teaching have been, you might say, formidable. The Maine Legislature recently honored that track record by inducting her into the Maine Franco-American Hall of Fame, where she joins such notables as the late Lewiston politician Georgette Berubé, sociologist Madeleine Giguère and Yvon Labbé, a champion of Maine’s Franco culture.

Rice-DeFosse was inducted in a March 19 ceremony at the State House. She was nominated for the Hall of Fame by state Rep. Margaret Rotundo, director of policy and strategic initiatives for �ֲ���ý’ Harward Center for Community Partnerships, and chosen by the state’s Franco-American legislators.

“I was very moved,” says Rice-DeFosse. “There are so many people in the community who are deserving of that kind of an award, and it’s unusual for people who are not of French heritage.” (Her husband, the late John DeFosse, was of French descent.)

One of Rice-DeFosse’s best-known community projects is a video documentary depicting women who wove an early and important social safety net in the Twin Cities. Les Soeurs Grises / The Grey Nuns: Elles sont venues, elles ont servi / They Came, They Served was completed in 2012, and is part of in Lewiston (now known as the Franco Center).

A branch of the Sisters of Charity of St. Hyacinthe, the Grey Nuns came to Lewiston in 1878 on the heels of French Canadian immigrants drawn by the thousands to work in Twin City mills. The nuns established the city’s first hospital (today’s St. Mary’s Regional Health Center) along with a nursing home, two orphanages and a school for nurses, all just blocks from �ֲ���ý.

The Grey Nuns draws heavily on interviews, several conducted by �ֲ���ý students, with former residents of the orphanages and other community members, as well as footage of members of the order provided by St. Mary’s. Rice-DeFosse researched, wrote, narrated and co-produced the film, created at the behest of the Franco Center and in collaboration with St. Mary’s Health System, the contemporary descendant of the nuns’ good works.

“I learned an enormous amount about what these women had done,” she says. “How incredibly innovative they were, in terms of delivering health care services, care for the elderly and care for children without parents and or whose parents were working.”

Rice-DeFosse’s department, in recent years and with funding from the Harward Center and the Maine Campus Compact, has restructured its curriculum to incorporate community-engaged learning at every course level.

“In the early levels, it’s just an introduction to the local community, and the fact that there are French speakers here,” she explains. More advanced students have done translations for community-related websites and museum exhibitions, and have conducted oral histories with local residents for an ongoing project related to Rice-DeFosse’s course “French in Maine.”

“I think that introduction to the notion that there are different communities within this community is important,” Rice-DeFosse says. “And we’ve found that students, having been introduced to community-engaged learning here, are able to take that experience abroad.” Students frequently design and conduct community research projects while studying abroad, often in Africa.

Community engagement has its impact on campus as well as in the community. “I like to develop in students the appreciation that there are many ways of thinking,” says Rice-DeFosse, “and the ability to think critically inside of the French language, because it immediately draws students outside of themselves.”

For students undertaking community-engaged learning in the context of French and francophone studies, the language “is no longer kind of a classroom game, about memorizing words and parroting,” as it might be at the high school level.

“Because we live in Lewiston-Auburn, there is something about the language and the cultural differences that make what we are teaching real,” says Rice-DeFosse. “So that connection is, I think, truly vital.”

April marks the 20th anniversary of this genocide in Rwanda, three months of violence in which Hutu extremists killed as many as 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutus.

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and Francophone studies, is an expert in the literary, cinematic and testimonial representations of the 1994 genocide.

�ֲ���ý students visit the Murabi Genocide Memorial site in 2009 as part of Alex Dauge-Roth’s Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide.” The sign refers to the French soldiers who created a volleyball pitch amidst mass graves during their occupation in June 1994. More than 50,000 people were massacred at the site.

He was invited to take part in two commemorative events last week organized by Bene-Rwanda, the Rwandan diaspora association in Italy. The events were part of “Kwibuka 20” — “We need to remember” — a commemoration based in the Rwandan capital of Kigali with satellite events around the world.

Dauge-Roth explains the events of 1994 and what is at stake for Rwanda moving forward.

1. What was the immediate impact of the genocide on life in Rwanda?

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, professor of French and Francophone studies.

The genocide killed more than two-thirds of the Tutsi living in Rwanda, close to 20 percent of the entire population and saw another 20 percent flee to the current Republic Democratic of Congo. In July 1994, the country was a field of ruins and chaos: No institutions had been spared. Suspicion and hatred prevailed among the two major segments of the population. Grief and trauma were palpable in everyone. The social cohesion of the country was in pieces, and everything had to be rebuilt from zero.

2. How did Rwanda move on after that?

The first priorities were national security, the rebuilding of the institutions, establishing peace in order to attract investments — and, of course, finding a way to implement justice to try the hundreds of thousands of people suspected to have taken part in the genocide.

The ethnic labels “Tutsi,” “Hutu” and “Twa” were banned from official government documents, and a nationalistic discourse arose to transcend ethnic divisions.

Moving quickly away from a punitive conception of justice to a form of transitional or restorative justice, the Rwandan government established in 2001 the gacaca courts. These courts heard 1.4 million cases in a span of 10 years.

�ֲ���ý students interact with local youth outside a bar in Nyamata during a visit in May 2013. For Dauge-Roth, the photo “signifies the global connectedness of Rwanda, where 60 percent of of the population has a cell phone and every young person has a Facebook page.”

3. How successful have these efforts been?

Needless to say, not everything has been achieved and nothing is perfect in Rwanda today — as is the case in any country, African or not. The current president, Paul Kagame, must step down in three years at the end of his second term. It remains to be seen if Rwanda’s institutions and the social fabric of the country will be strong enough to ensure a peaceful political transition.

Among the challenges are Rwanda’s distribution of wealth and demographic trends: The population has doubled in 20 years, and land and resources are scarce.

In the long term, though, the biggest issue will be to see how the generation born after the genocide — more than 50 percent of the current population — will embrace the newly coined national identity and whether they refuse to revive ethnic categories and hatred for political gain.

4. Tell us about your involvement with the commemoration events in Italy.

My talk in Rome focused on the numerous political and personal challenges survivors face when voicing their experiences. Their testimonies are an attempt to gain social recognition for their past sufferings and present needs.

In addition to a roundtable on the tensions between personal and collective memory in post-genocide Rwanda, I also led a pedagogical workshop in Genoa, where I presented the value of learning with survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi when teaching courses on this genocide and the current national reunification process.

5. What other projects on Rwanda do you have planned?

With French colleagues, I am organizing a three-day international conference and a film cycle in Paris this November themed “Rwanda 1994–2014: Memory Constructs and the Writing of History Twenty Years After the Genocide.”

My current book project, Who Speaks Behind the Archive? Personal and National Reconciliation in Rwanda, focuses on the cinematic and documentary representations of the reconciliation process in Rwanda.

6. Are you planning to teach your travel Short Term “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda” in the near future?

I plan to go back with students in 2016, before Rwanda’s presidential elections in 2017.

In the meantime, I will teach a new version of the course “Documenting the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda” this fall, with a special focus on how the current politics of national reunification and the gacaca transitional justice have shaped representations of the genocide.

Caroline Baumann ’87 is the director of Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Photograph © by Erin Baiano.

The June appointment of Caroline Baumann ’87 as director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, was noted by scores of media outlets, including The New York Times.

quotes Smithsonian secretary Wayne Clough, who praised Baumann for being “especially adept at forming substantive partnerships in New York, in Washington, across the nation and, indeed, around the world.”

Since joining Cooper-Hewitt in 2001, Baumann has held many leadership positions at the museum, most recently as acting director.

Gilbert Ndahayo.

A Rwandan filmmaker dedicated to producing documentaries about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Gilbert Ndahayo visits �ֲ���ý College to show his new film, The Rwandan Night, at 7 p.m. Monday, March 4, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact adaugero@bates.edu.

The Rwandan Night is the sequel to Ndahayo’s autobiographical piece about the murder of his family, 2012’s Rwanda: Beyond The Deadly Pit, and is the second film in a planned trilogy about the tragic events of 1994.

This 70-minute ethnographic documentary explores the world of the oldest survivor of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. One night in 2006, the 51-year-old Sakindi bears witness to the genocide. Instead of living alone with the sorrow of losing his parents and other family members, he decides to speak for the first time before a large audience during a commemoration at Mumena Stadium in the capital city of Rwanda.

Ndahayo lost his parents and 52 other family members in the genocide. Today he is a candidate for a master’s degree in fine arts at Columbia University. His films as writer and director include the award-winning Scars of My Days (2007) and Behind This Convent (2008).

An image from the 2009 �ֲ���ý visit to Rwanda for the course “Learning with the Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide.”

In its story about teaching genocide, International Educator features the �ֲ���ý course “Learning with Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide,” taught by Associate Professor of French Alex Dauge-Roth.

Writer Dana Wilkie frames the challenge of teaching genocide this way: “How does a university program…address the power of political regimes and demagogues bent on inciting the sort of hatred that leads one people to commit atrocities against another?”

Dauge-Roth, who conducts ongoing research in Rwanda and directs the nonprofit , offers an answer by first noting that “we all have defenses that allow us to intellectualize” horrific acts like genocide.

“But when there’s more intimate proximity with the human effects of genocide, the way you relate to such events shifts radically,” he says.

In the case of Dauge-Roth’s course, he and students travel to Rwanda, where students partner with orphans of the 1994 genocide to create oral histories and other documentary resources.

Achieving this kind of “intimate proximity” (which is the title of the article), creates “ways to move on and to create connections and dialogues” to prevent future genocide.

• View story about Dauge-Roth’s course in �ֲ���ý Magazine, Fall 2009.