Jeff Rider
Resident Director 2024-2025
director@vwpp.org
Jeff Rider is the Resident Director of the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris for the 2024-2025 academic year. He is a Professor of French and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University. He specializes in Flemish history, the Arthurian legend and medievalism (the reception and uses of medieval artifacts in contemporary society).
Professor Rider is the author, editor or translator of twelve books and has published over forty-five articles, essays, or chapters in collective works. His most recent book is a translation and study of Walter of Thérouanne’s “The Life of Count Charles of Flanders,” “The Life of Lord John, Bishop of Thérouanne” and Related Works (2024). His other major publications include God’s Scribe: The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges (2001), an edition of Galbert of Bruges’s De multro, traditione et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum (1994) and a translation of this same work: The Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders (2013). He has also edited Walter of Thérouanne’s Vita Karoli comitis Flandrie et Vita domni Ioannis Morinensis episcopi (2006) and co-edited and co-translated the thirteenth-century Lai du conseil (2013). He is the editor or co-editor of several collective volumes including Obscurity in Medieval Texts (2013), The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt and Hypocrisy (2011), Le Diocèse de Thérouanne au Moyen Age (2010), and Galbert of Bruges and the Historiography of Medieval Flanders (2009).
He has a forthcoming volume devoted to The Earliest Genealogies and Histories of the Counts of Flanders (Brussels: Royal Historical Commission). He is currently at work on an edition of Andreas of Marchiennes’ Succinct History of the Deeds and Succession of the French Kings and a book on The Usefulness of the Middle Ages.
Professor Rider has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the American Philosophical Society, the Rotary Foundation, and the Belgian Fondation Nationale de Recherche Scientifique. He has held residential fellowships at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, St. Deiniol’s/Gladstone’s Library, the Fondation des Treilles, and the Herzog August Bibliothek. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis, the University of Paris Est Créteil, the University of Lille III, the Catholic University of Louvain, the Charles University (Prague), the University of Ghent, the University of Southern Denmark, and the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima).
A graduate of Yale University in combined French and English literature, he received a Diplôme d’études médiévales from the Université Catholique de Louvain and a master’s and doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. He also attended Deep Springs College and took three years of courses at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. His teaching specialties are medieval and Renaissance French literature, the Arthurian legend, and medieval Flemish history.
At Wesleyan, Professor Rider has served as chair of the Romance Languages and Literatures Department and the Medieval Studies Program, and has been the resident director of the Wesleyan Program in Paris numerous times.
Hannah Gersten
Assistant Director
hgersten@vwpp.org
Hannah Gersten is Assistant Director of the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris. Her passion for French language and culture dates back to her junior year abroad with Tufts University which she spent in Paris, taking courses at Sciences Po and living with a French host family. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s M.A. program in History and Literature, located at Reid Hall in Paris, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she earned a Master 2 in French literature. In Paris, Hannah enjoys going to the theatre, running along the Seine, and shopping for antiques.
Sophie Kolesnikov
Program Coordinator
skolesnikov@vwpp.org
Sophie Kolesnikov is the Program Coordinator of the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris. She handles all things related to student life in Paris, the VWPP’s cultural program and extracurricular activities. She holds a master’s degree in Geopolitics of the arts and culture from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, where she studied in the departments of anglophone studies and cultural mediation. She is a plant-based cooking enthusiast and also takes an interest in literature, art history and Asian and anglophone cultures.
The Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris is located in Reid Hall, Paris.
VWPP – Reid Hall
4 rue de Chevreuse
75006 Paris
FRANCE
info@vwpp.org
+33 1 43 22 12 47
