About Marc

Marc Snyder has a Doctorate and Masters degrees from Stanford University in French Literature & Western Culture. Currently, he lives in Pittsburgh PA.

As a teen, I had visions of being a surfer in Morocco.You can read an informal chronology of my life in the about page of my blog. As a teen I had a lot of projects & ambitions: being a novelist, entomologist, ski bum, chef. After two years of study at The Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington) where I studied renaissance literature, Chinese philosophy and classical guitar, I worked for a summer for the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) in Juntura Oregon, in Malheur County - putting out brush fires, avoiding local gun fanatics who hated government officials, & reading Marcel Proust & L.-F.Céline in the east Oregon deserts. After Oregon, I was off to Toulouse in the south of France to study French literature at the Université de Toulouse-le-Mirail - where I enrolled in the French university program in Lettres & Études Occitanes. In Toulouse, I had a red VW Beetle, and learned to drive on the back roads of France - with occasional side-tours to Spain to see soccer matches with my German buddies.

My route into teaching French is a circuitous one. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, French, English, & Vietnamese were my first languages. No, I wasn't an army or state-department brat. During our peregrinations, I was thrown into whatever local schools there were. My father worked as an economist in developing (mainly francophone) countries; in Paris, he was at OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - where his boss was the marxist political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. He currently trying to write novels, & lives with his wife in Aix-en-Provence, France. A graduate of the famous Le Cordon Bleu cooking school (where Julia Child studied) my mother is an accomplished chef, and is very active in international affairs in Springfield, Illinois. Among other accomplishments, she has co-authored a book on Moroccan cuisine, was president of the Springfield chapter of the World Affairs Council, runs a yearly international film festival, and is a member of the Anti-Rust society in Springfield.

The picture you see of me (above) was taken in Aix-en-Provence in front of my father's appartment.

 

About my professional life:

I have a double Masters & a Ph.D from Stanford U. in French & Western Civilization (XXth century French literature, criticism; Western literature, philosophy from Homer to Heidegger) - where I worked with many prominent people in the field: René Girard (my dissertation advisor) Michel Serres, Henri Godard, Alphonse Juilland, as well as textbook authors Ralph Hester and John Barson. I have taught at Stanford University, Iowa State, Middlebury College, Carnegie Mellon, and Duquesne University.

In Paris, I went to l'École Alsacienne (1964-68), and worked as an unpaid librarian (in exchange for access to the archives) for a private collection of Gallimard press (1985-86) at the university for Paris VII.

In addition to teaching university French in the Pittsburgh area, I am a technical writer and web developer.

À très bientôt,

Marc Snyder, Ph.D.

Contact off-line

FranceInfo.US
Pittsburgh PA
USA