Elara Sherman
Dean's Teaching Fellow
Elara Sherman (she / they ; elle / yelle) is a PhD candidate in French and a Dean’s Teaching Fellow at the CFDE. Over her time at Emory, Elara has taught courses ranging from beginning to upper-intermediate French, and served as a teaching assistant in Emory’s first Wolof language course in Senegal. Passionate about inclusive pedagogy, she has organized events and resources on gender-just languaging to equip language instructors with strategies to better support students of all genders in their classrooms. They have presented papers on “Ungrading” which reflect upon the empowering potentials as well as the limitations of these strategies. Elara also worked as an Accessibility and Mental Health Program Assistant for Emory's Summer in Senegal Study Abroad Program, where she supported students navigating cultural differences and advocated for their accessibility needs in and outside the classroom.
Elara’s dissertation research focuses on (dis)ability and sexuality in decolonial French-speaking literature from Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and their diasporas. Their second dissertation chapter, “Cronos and the Queer Belly: A Politics of Confinement in the Work of Linda Lê” was published in the journal Women in French in 2024.
Elara holds an MA in philosophy from the University of Memphis (2020) and a BA in French studies and philosophy from Sewanee: The University of the South (2017).