Staff and Faculty

With over twenty years of experience in international education, Mary Ann has been a part of the CUPA team since 1999. As Program Director, she is dedicated to upholding the highest academic standards and encourages students to seek out rich intellectual experiences during their time in Paris. Mary Ann is the liaison between CUPA and home universities. In this capacity she communicates regularly with Study Abroad offices and academic departments to ensure that a student’s academic requirements are met. Thanks to her background in both American and French academia, Mary Ann has a unique understanding of the challenges American students might face in adapting to the French system and above all how to help them thrive.

Cécile has long been fascinated with questions of interculturality, specifically as they relate to French and American academia. She first started working at CUPA in 1999 while completing a degree in translation. The knowledge of how different cultures express themselves has been paramount in her ability to help students navigate the intricacies of the French university system. Although her role at CUPA spans many aspects of a student’s life abroad, her main focus is to advise students academically and to serve as a liaison between French university faculty and CUPA.

A proud CUPA alumna (2015), Jasmine brings a deep appreciation for the French language, culture, and academic exchange to her role at CUPA. Her time in Paris, taking courses at the CUPA study center and directly matriculating into courses at Sorbonne Université and Université de Paris 8 – Saint-Denis, allowed her to immerse herself in the rigors of the French university system while exploring the city’s cultural life. The experience sparked a lasting commitment to living in and learning about new cultures.

Since her time in France, Jasmine has cultivated a career in corporate communications and project management with work that consistently bridged audiences across cultures and industries. Now based in New York, Jasmine enjoys gardening, a hobby likely inspired by the many hours spent wandering the Jardin du Luxembourg, Jardin des Plantes, and other green spaces around Paris.

Jasmine is excited to return to CUPA in a professional capacity as the program’s only U.S.-based team member. She is serving as the primary contact for students, parents, and study abroad offices, and is responsible for outreach and recruitment efforts at colleges and universities. Jasmine supports students from their very first inquiry through the admissions and pre-departure process, helping them prepare for an amazing experience in Paris.

Originally from Paris, Samantha grew up in a multicultural environment and has been fascinated by languages since a young age. She earned a degree in English from the Université Paris Sorbonne before taking a gap year to volunteer with associations in Paris, where she taught French to adults. It was through teaching that she discovered her true passion, prompting her to continue her studies at the Université Paris Nanterre, where she obtained her Master’s degree in 2019.
Before joining CUPA, Samantha traveled across Europe, Asia, and Africa. She spent some time in Odessa, Ukraine, teaching French in different institutions. She then taught for three years at the Alliance française in Manila, Philippines. In 2023, she worked as a pedagogical director at the Alliance française in Johannesburg and Soweto, where she stayed for two years.
At CUPA, Samantha is in charge of helping and accompanying students (re)discover Paris and other cities in France. She also updates the website and CUPA’s social medias.

Passionate about teaching since an early age, Alice first started tutoring children as a teenager and later decided to turn this passion into a career. She began her English cultural and literature studies at the university of Nice and later moved to the UK to experience living and studying abroad. After teaching French at the University of Nottingham for a year, Alice decided to combine her interest for French language and culture and her love for teaching by pursuing a Masters in Français Langue Étrangère at the university of Paris Nanterre. Since graduating in 2019, she has been teaching in a number of different institutions, helping anyone from American art students to international refugees to make progress in French. As CUPA’s French Language Coordinator, Alice and her team of French teaching interns provide students with the tools to perfect their French language skills and take full advantage of their semester from a linguistic perspective. She also teaches French languages classes during our summer program and the regular academic year.

Since April 2024, Alice manages the housing coordination and helps bring together students and host families.

Originally from Canada where he studied Fine Arts at the University of Ottawa, Nicolas moved to Paris in 1986 after receiving a fellowship from the Ministère Français des Affaires étrangères to pursue a Maîtrise in Esthetics at the Université de Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne. In addition to being a professor of Art History, Nicolas is also an artist who exhibits his paintings in France and Canada. Following the advent of the Internet, Photoshop, social media, etc. he turned his attention to the digital image and is dedicated to exploring the artistic potential of this nascent field of esthetics. He is in search of a new visual language that exists somewhere between the virtual and the real.
At CUPA, Nicolas Baudouin teaches Major Movements in 19th Century French Painting during the regular academic year, as well as during the summer Program.

Christelle Taraud is a historian specializing in contemporary Maghreb, with a focus on gender and sexuality issues within the colonial context.  She is a member of the Centre d’histoire du XIXe siècle, an inter-university research center based at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and the Université de Paris-1.

At CUPA, Christelle teaches French Methodology during Orientation and the semester-long course Diversity in Paris: From Communities to Communitarianism? Throughout the semester she maintains office hours to meet with students individually about any question related to methodology they might have.

Educated at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, Jean-Philippe Dedieu holds a Ph.D. in History and Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). A former Fulbright Scholar at University of California, Berkeley, his research focuses on the political history and sociology of the African diaspora. In addition to contributions to Al Jazeera, The New Yorker and The New York Times, he is the author of Immigrant Voices: African Migrants in the Public Sphere in France, 1960-1995 (Paris: Klincksieck/Les Belles Lettres).
Jean Philippe teaches Postcolonial Paris for CUPA, during the Summer session, a course which examines the development of the particular, intense, and historically conflicted relationship between the French State and ethno-racial and religious minorities.

Marie Demestre is a writer and French teacher based in Paris. Inspired by her experience in Cairo during the “Arab Spring,” she is particularly interested in the philosophical and political aspects of language as they apply to art and revolt, or to poetry and justice. In addition to teaching literature at Panthéon-Sorbonne, Marie has also taught French at New York University, the French Cultural Center of Alexandria, ASML (free media in Syria), and Ecole Polytechnique.

At CUPA, she teaches Writing the Self: Exploring Literature through the Concept of Intimacy and holds office hours throughout the semester to address students’ methodology questions. During CUPA’s Summer session, Marie teaches the advanced-level French language class, which provides students with the linguistic, pragmatic, and semantic tools to live the French language through modern issues in situ.

Pierre André received his PhD from NYU’s Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture in 2018, after specializing in 18th and 19th century French literature and philosophy. He has been living and working in Paris since 2019, teaching various courses revolving around the relationship between French (and Western) philosophy and the history of sciences, the concepts of “progress” and “modernity”, and their social, political and ecological implications.
At CUPA, he teaches (Re)thinking nature: historical, philosophical and anthropological perspectives on ecology, an exploration of what we now call the “anthropology of Nature”, a challenge to the old “Nature/Culture” divide to rethink our ecological paradigm.

Before becoming an academic, Mehdi Derfoufi spent over 15 years as a curator for the cinema and for festivals, and as an editor and journalist.  He is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, Gender and Postcolonial theory and Media Studies at the University of Paris 8, and researcher at CEMTI (Centre d’Études sur les Médias et l’Internationalisation). He is also a visiting professor at the École d’Art de Lausanne (Switzerland). In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he is the author of Racisme et jeu vidéo (Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, 2021).
At CUPA, he teaches Gender and the media, a course that examines the discourses and representations of gender, class and race in the Media (cinema, video games, television, etc.)