SOPHIA MILLMAN, a Ph.D. candidate in French and fellow in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University, received the 2025 Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship for exceptional young scholars in the field of French language, literature, and culture. Millman (ΦBK, Hamilton College) earned her Master of Arts in French Studies from New York University and her Bachelor of Arts in English from Hamilton College. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century literature and cinema, with additional expertise in feminist philosophy and cultural gerontology.
The fellowship’s $20,000 stipend will support her dissertation project, “Styles of Aging: The Later Lives and Last Works of Simone de Beauvoir, Agnès Varda, Maryse Condé, and Annie Ernaux,” which investigates how these four influential women crafted their final works and approached the experience of aging. Her project explores how these writers experimented with new aesthetic styles and redefined their legacies, offering new ways of thinking about aging, gender, and creative expression.
LUCY WHITELEY, a Ph.D. candidate and Provost Fellow in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Southern California, won the 2025 Walter J. Jensen Fellowship in recognition of her exceptional research in French cinema and cultural history. The award provides Whiteley with a stipend of $17,000 and round-trip travel to France, where she will conduct research for her dissertation, “After la Zone: The Poetics of Negative Space.”
Whiteley (ΦΒΚ, Cornell University) earned her Master of Studies in U.S. History with Merit from the University of Oxford and her Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in French and History from Cornell University. The fellowship will support her exploration of how the legacy of “la Zone,” a peripheral ring that surrounded Paris from 1841 until 1944, influenced French filmmakers’ treatment of liminal spaces in their work following 1944. Drawing on both archival materials and site-based research, her work traces how la Zone continues to influence artistic and political landscapes in France and beyond.