Meghan K. McGinley is a Ph.D. candidate in the French Literature program at Vanderbilt University. She obtained her B.A. in French from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington where she completed a distinguished senior thesis entitled “Mythic Chimera: Reimagining Genet Through Deleuze” which explores the de-estabilshment of the dimension and the foundation of the mythic Hero in Genet’s The Screens.
McGinley is a specialist in French film, focusing on the French New Wave. Her dissertation project “Ludic Ideology at Odds: Game and Play in French New Wave Cinema” draws on play theory and geopolitical history to examine how the French New Wave filmmakers visually respond to the shifting ludic landscape of the postwar era. For the 2021-2022 academic year, McGinley was awarded a Mellon Fellowship in Digital Humanities. Her DH project “Mapping the Tarot: Game and Divination Across Time” utilizes various holdings from the George Clulow-United States Playing Card Company Gaming Collection in Vanderbilt University’s Special Collections to trace the geospatial evolution of the tarot using ArcGIS and its StoryMaps feature.
McGinley has also been the recipient of numerous accolades while at Vanderbilt. From the College of Arts and Sciences, she was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award in 2021 for displaying pedagogical ingenuity and excellence in the classroom. Additionally, a Summer Research Award in 2019 from the College of Arts and Sciences assisted her research in film at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, France. The Department of French and Italian has also recognized her teaching and research, receiving the following acknowledgments: The Claude & Vincenette Pichois Award for Excellence in Graduate Research (2021), The Claude & Vincenette Pichois Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2020), and two Pichois Award for Summer Travel and Research (2017 and 2018).
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