The Department of Modern Languages at UNL is deeply saddened by the death of Emerita Professor Nicole Fouletier-Smith last week in Sarasota, Florida, where she had retired. Her contagious enthusiasm and savoir-faire made her a pillar of the department for almost fifty years.
Nicole was a native of Saint-Chamond (Loire). She earned university degrees in Greek and Latin at the Université de Lyon after having attended a boarding school in that city taught by the Dames du Sacré Coeur. She was then awarded a fellowship to continue her classical studies in Athens, Greece. There she met a Nebraskan, Donald Smith, and following their marriage, they settled in Lincoln in the late 1960s. Her talents were quickly recognized, and she began coordinating the first-year French program and its staff of graduate assistants, a function that remained a core of her contribution to the department. After completing her Ph.D. on the Theban Cycle Legends in early modern French theater (1974), she was promoted from lecturer to assistant professor in 1977 and the next year to associate professor. In 1996, she became a full professor.
Deeply committed to her profession and to her students, Nicole energized UNL’s French program with the introduction of innovative pedagogical strategies. In the late 1970s, she implemented John Rassias’s “Dartmouth” intensive method of language instruction. After a NEH summer seminar on teaching contemporary French civilization she revamped our sequence of culture courses. This work led to her groundbreaking 1995 first-year textbook, Parallèles: communication et culture (co-authored with Wendy Allen, with an exercise manual by Nicole’s UNL colleague Pam Le Zotte), which featured contrasts between cultural practices in the United States and in the French-speaking world. Extremely successful with our students, Parallèles was a highly-regarded work in the field at large; it went through several editions, and was adopted for French courses in universities across the country. She was among the first Nebraskans to be certified as an oral proficiency evaluator using the OPI testing method. Her openness to experiment and her ability to spark students made her in demand as an instructor in university-wide programs such as the freshmen seminars and the ADAPT program. She was invited as a visiting professor at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. In addition to her textbook, she published many articles on literary, cultural, and pedagogical topics in professional journals.
She received multiple recognitions for her contributions, among them the Palmes académiques from the French government, and teaching award after teaching award at the department, college, and university levels, including the Annis Chaiken Sorensen award in 1995. A Daily Nebraskan reporter once described her classroom style as “intense, vivacious … she teaches with the zeal that saved Paris.” She motivated students in the classroom, and she continued mentoring them long after their studies were completed. Her colleagues at UNL will deeply miss her boisterous humor, her intense seriousness where teaching was concerned, her sincere concern for her students, her generosity, and her vitality.
She is survived by her husband Donald Smith, and by her children, Marie-Françoise (Doudi) and Ralph.
