Victoria Isuani

Hailing from Colorado, Victoria graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 2025 with a double major in English and French/Francophone Literary Studies and a minor in Art History. She spent the spring of 2024 in Bordeaux, France, with Middlebury College’s School in France immersion program. Her undergraduate career culminated with a Senior Honors Thesis titled “Wave of Wrath: Literature, Feminist Rage, and Social Change,” a research project interrogating the political power of poetry through a linguistic analysis of feminist rage in American literature in the 1960s and ‘70s. From an academic standpoint, she is fascinated by women’s narratives, intersectionality, the relationship between les arts plastiques and literature, and the study of romance languages.

Victoria is excited to spend this year conducting a comparative character analysis between La Marquise de Merteuil of Les liaisons dangereuses and the titular character of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. She hopes to uncover how the epistolary form gives women characters agency and power, as well as demonstrate whether or not Merteuil and Lady Susan’s (perceived) wickedness is merely a tactic necessary to survive 18th-century patriarchy.

Whenever she finds a spare moment, Victoria enjoys sketching in the museums of Paris, making jewelry, drinking a café au lait or citron pressé, writing poems, going to an art exhibit or ballet performance, petting dogs, and singing along to musical theatre soundtracks.