Instructors

Lynn Ramey is Professor of French and Cinema and Media Arts and Chair of the Department of French and Italian. Ramey has taught History of French Film for more than 20 years and took students to the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2024, and 2025. Her research interests are in films about the Middle Ages and video game studies. You can reach her at lynn.ramey@vanderbilt.edu.

 

 

Raisa Rexer is Associate Professor of French. Rexer is a specialist in nineteenth-century French photography and its place in literature and visual culture. Her book The Fallen Veil: A Literary and Cultural History of the Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) traces how early nude photography shaped writers such as Baudelaire, the Goncourts, and Zola, and how public debate about these images changed over the century. She also writes art criticism and has been a regular contributor to Apollo magazine. On the Maymester she brings that expertise to the transition from photography to film, the story of how the still image became the moving one.