Professor Péron is a senior lecturer in the French and Francophone department at the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences, where she received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty.  

Péron brought survivors’ stories to the classroom again this year, following her week in residence at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Professor Péron decided to put a human face on the abstract dates and numbers that comprise most Holocaust education when teaching a new course on occupied France in World War II. In her course, she connected testimony to three works about French Jews the students will be reading: the diary of Helene Berr, letters from Louise Jacobson, and a novel about Dora Bruder. All three women were about 20 during the war and all three died when they were deported from France during the occupation. “The objective of the course is to put a voice on silences in a time period when it was taboo [to speak about the occupation] for many reasons,” Péron said. “So giving a voice to written words, I think that’s what’s going to make it tangible for my students.”