Cecelia Ramsey is a third-year PhD student in the Department of French and Italian. Prior to Princeton, she earned a master’s degree from NYU in literary translation from French to English. Her master’s thesis involved a translation of Minh Tran Huy’s Voyageur malgré lui (2014), a poetic work of fiction that weaves historical anecdotes into a semi-autobiographical narrative, crossing borders in both time and space. As a translator and copyeditor, she also spent time working with an international literary agency and editing DeepL translations for a French newspaper. 

Her current research interests focus on the social history of books, including the way that books are made, translated, and received in different milieus. She is also interested in early modern print; the history and translation of punctuation; the writing of collective memory; works that break with stylistic or linguistic norms; oral histories; and the connections between reading and judgment.

Passionate about pedagogy and mentorship, Cecelia has taught language in diverse environments, ranging from a two-room schoolhouse to a liberal arts university to a women’s prison. With experience in collaborative teaching, she is interested in innovative course design that connects French to other disciplines. She welcomes any questions from prospective students.