Profile

Elisabeth Bloom is a Ph.D. candidate in French at Princeton University. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music, with a double major in French language and literature. A cellist since the age of eight, Elisabeth has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, and the United Nations, as well as in France, in China, and at orchestral and chamber music festivals around the United States; she has twice been a member of the World Youth Symphony Orchestra. At Princeton, she has continued her cello studies with Professor Alberto Parrini. Elisabeth’s general research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and music as well as play theory, early and middle childhood pedagogy, children's literature, and Francophone cinema. Her dissertation project, tentatively titled Poupées, Pedagogy, and Play: An Examination of the Nineteenth-Century French Doll Novel as Literary Genre, is a close reading of a corpus of fictional narratives ranging in length from brief exempla to full-fledged novelistic sagas and marketed toward a juvenile female bourgeois readership as diverting educational manuals. Elisabeth is an enthusiastic language pedagogue and has been an instructor for the Prison Teaching Initiative (part of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning) and the Princeton Graduate School Summer Language Program, in addition to teaching undergraduate courses on campus.