Biography
Dr. Garren is a dedicated and enthusiastic Christian educator, proud to have built a proven record of academic excellence in teaching the French language, literature, and culture on two continents 鈥� Europe and North America. She has managed to maximize her students鈥� learning experiences by always striving for excellence, always developing each student’s performance character in order to raise achievement and always going above and beyond to make each academic year a successful one, filled with numerous rewarding experiences.
As an international educator, Dr. Garren has often been involved in the European Union鈥檚 educational initiatives such as the Socrates and Comenius, and has attracted several fully funded grants aimed to help both students and teachers gain an understanding of the international dimension to teaching and learning via student/teacher mobility activities and in-service trainings.
Dr. Garren鈥檚 two other passions besides teaching are theater and literature. She has introduced her students to the world of theatre as a new language learning method, by successfully coordinating a theatrical group of French expression that has won numerous national and international awards. Her interest for literature constantly feeds itself on reading, writing, and publishing locally, nationally and internationally. Her most illustrious literary accomplishment is her book, Alienation and Absurd in the New Theatre of the 1950s: Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Arthur Adamov, which demonstrates how three playwrights from different cultural backgrounds and views changed the 1950鈥檚 theatrical scenery, by expressing their feelings of alienation in an incomprehensible and irrational world where human beings live the incurable experience of the Absurd, while also building a 鈥渘ew鈥� metaphysical, symbolic and allegorical theatre based on traditional aesthetic and artistic procedures, yet serving a modern philosophical approach, profoundly related to existentialism.
Degrees
PhD in French Literature, Universite d’Artois/Universitatea 聞AL. I. Cuza聯 din Iasi | MA in French and Francophone Studies, Universitatea 聞Alexandru Ioan Cuza聯 din Iasi | BA in Modern Languages; Tchg French and English as Foreign Lang, Universitatea 聞Alexandru Ioan Cuza聯 din Iasi