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Lucy Smith ’03 (Red Bank, N.J.), a double major in French and art, is honing her French skills by translating newsletter articles published by and for the Jewish community of Dijon, France.
A participant in the EXCEL Scholars program, Smith is collaborating with Robert Weiner, T. Roy and L. Forrest Jones Professor of History. In EXCEL, students work closely with faculty on research while earning a stipend.
“She’s doing very intelligent and painstaking work, as the topics cover everything from the Holocaust to religion to politics,” says Weiner. “As an added challenge, there are many Jewish and Yiddish terms found in the articles.”
The project, part of Weiner’s continuing research on the Jewish community of Dijon, has proved rewarding for Smith. “When Professor Weiner called me in Paris to ask if I wanted to do EXCEL work, I said ‘yes’ immediately,” says Smith. “When I found out the project had to do with a Dijon Jewish newsletter, I was really interested, because I studied there last fall.”
The project introduced Smith to another Dijon community and has helped her gain a better perspective of French society. “Translating these articles for Professor Weiner is more interesting than I anticipated. I am using the French I learned in Dijon and Paris last year, and it’s a nice bridge from my study abroad experience to the thesis I will write next school year,” she says.
After graduating from Lafayette, Smith hopes to obtain a degree in library science and would like to work with special collections, archives, and rare books. An EXCEL project Smith participated in last year enabled her to examine this avenue of interest, as she had the opportunity to catalog a collection of Lafayette student scrapbooks dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
While Smith’s summer EXCEL work is not directly related to her future plans, she is pleased to continue what she terms her “French connection.”
“I don’t know of any other institution that offers this opportunity to undergraduate students,” she says.
Lucy Smith ’03 honed her French language skills by translating articles published in the Jewish community of Dijon, France, as an EXCEL Scholar working with Robert Weiner, Jones Professor of History.