The Department of French and Italian (FIT) congratulates all its students from the Class of 2024 on their graduation from Princeton University! In addition to its concentrators — Emmanuelle Adamson, Mikaela Avakian and Teddy Gutman — FIT awarded five departmental prizes and 32 language and culture certificates to students from across 16 departments.
Avakian received the Prix du Cercle Français/Association Francophone de Princeton for the best senior thesis in French, titled "Ink, Ire, Identity: Haratch and the Armenian Immigrant Press of 1920s France." The André Maman Senior Thesis Prize, for an outstanding thesis on the culture, economy, history, politics or society of France, was divided between French language certificate student Kennedy Walls of the Anthropology department and Lana Gaige of Comparative Literature.
The Lucio Caputo Senior Thesis Prize for an outstanding thesis on the literature, language, culture, economy, history, politics or society of Italy went to Italian certificate student Fernando Avilés García of Computer Science for his work "Divining Language: Unearthing Medieval Italian Through NLP,” which applied computational methods to textual analysis of Dante.
Avilés García is one of seven Italian certificates from six departments — including History, Art & Archaeology, Molecular Biology, SPIA and Phliosophy — all of whom were inducted into the Gamma Kappa Alpha National Italian Honor Society. They graduate alongside a group of 25 French certificates from 14 departments across the university.
Also recognized at the Class Day ceremony were French concentrator Audrey Yang '25, recipient of the R. Percy Alden Memorial Prize for the best junior in French, and a slate of eight first-years awarded the Dorothea van Dyke McLane Prize for outstanding work in Italian: Jordan Angel, Jane Buckhurst, Marko Ingjilizov, Anuj Krishnan, Rafael Perez, Sasha Rotko, Vincent Sanfedele and Evan Shidler.
The department congratulates all on their achievements and sends its best wishes on their academic and professional futures.
