On April 19, 2025, FIT Ph.D. students Claire Massy-Paoli and Cecelia Ramsey represented Princeton at the Fourth Annual Choix Goncourt US, hosted at the Villa Albertine in New York. 

This initiative, organized by the Académie Goncourt alongside the French Institute for Culture and Education, invites students from universities across the United States to select a laureate among the Prix Goncourt finalists. Princeton’s jury consisted of eight Ph.D. students from the Department of French and Italian: Claire Massy-Paoli, Clara Soucanh, Fenian Kenney, Ariane Xuan Lo, Yassine Ait Ali, Elyssa Schaeffer, Adrian Trust, and Cecelia Ramsey. Additionally, included in the Princeton jury were two visiting students: Coralie Custos Quatreville, currently enrolled at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, and Théo Fourmond-Lecoq, a student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Cecelia represented the Princeton jury during the deliberation and the vote, joining peers from Columbia, Duke, Harvard, NYU, the University of Florida, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Southern California, UCLA, and Yale. Then, Claire and Cecelia conducted readings of excerpts from the finalist novels during the ceremony. Together, the jurors studied four shortlisted works—Madelaine avant l’aube by Sandrine Collette, Houris by Kamel Daoud, Jacaranda by Gaël Faye, and Archipels by Hélène Gaudy—before debating and selecting the winner during a ceremony chaired by Honorary Chair Neige Sinno.