Kiki Kosnick

Associate Professor of French

• Phone: 309-794-7217
• Email: kikikosnick@augustana.edu
• Office: Denkmann 126

A collection of gender-inclusive French language resources is available here.

I use they/them pronouns or proper pronouns in English; in French I use the non-binary pronouns iel/læ/ellui. 

I completed my Ph.D. in French with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. Before starting at Augustana in the fall of 2017, I was a visiting faculty member at Grinnell College for three years.

I teach courses on francophone literary and cultural studies and all levels of French language. I also regularly offer a queer theory course for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. I am active in the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education and was a member of their 2019 Teaching Vocational Exploration seminar cohort. 

My recent scholarship centers queer and feminist approaches to (teaching) gender-inclusive French. My article “The Everyday Poetics of Gender-Inclusive French: Strategies for Navigating the Linguistic Landscape” won the 2019 Florence Howe Award for outstanding feminist scholarship. In 2021, my essay “Inclusive Language Pedagogy for (Un)Teaching Gender in French” appeared in Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom.

I grew up in northern Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac area and was a first-generation college student. I have since lived abroad in France and Switzerland and spent a year working odd jobs while traveling the U.S. in a motorhome.

I value opportunities to engage with student researchers. Examples of interdisciplinary projects I have mentored include:

Coming Out Culture and LGBTQ+ Teachers — Maddie Schaefer '22

Embracing écriture inclusive: Students Respond to Gender Inclusivity in the French Language Classroom — Rebecca Garbe '20

Looking Beyond Binaries to Avoid Polarization in the Sex Work Debate — Laura Keenan '22

The Morphology of Sex: Tracking Change in the Sex Discourse at Augustana College — Robert Burke '20

Not Queer Enough: How Current Medical School Curriculum is Failing the LGBT+ Community — Vanessa Iroegbulem '21

Queer Even in Safe Spaces: Homelessness, Shelter Failures, and the Queer Community — Kara West '24

Why the Binary?: Cisnormativity in Athletics — Iliana Smiser '22

Specializations: French, Language education, Francophone literature, Queer Studies, Gender and feminist theory, Postcolonial literature