Meet our Team
Shanny Peer has been Director of the Columbia Maison Française since 2009. She earned a Ph.D. from New York University’s Institute of French Studies in 1992 and taught French Studies for ten years, at the University of Vermont and then NYU, where she was the only non-tenured faculty member to receive a Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence in 1997. She was then Director of Policy Programs at the French-American Foundation for 8 years and worked briefly at Families and Work Institute on work-family policies before joining Columbia University.
Shanny Peer is the author of numerous scholarly articles and a book, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (1999), which won the Laurence Wylie Prize for Best Book in French Cultural Studies in 1999. She wrote several policy reports for the French-American Foundation, including Equal from the Start: Promoting Educational Opportunity for All Preschool Children: Learning from the French Experience and Equality of Opportunity in Education and Employment: French and American Perspectives. While at the French-American Foundation, she directed comparative policy programs on French and U.S. approaches to early childhood education, anti-discrimination/affirmative action policies, health care, and work-family policy. She also testified before the U.S. Senate (in the presence of Senators Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy), organized major conferences, and conducted study tours to France for high-level delegations including several U.S. governors and senators.
Shanny Peer's accomplishments as Director include spearheading the Centennial celebration of the Maison Française in 2013, researching and curating a physical exhibition, online exhibition, and catalog on the 100-year history of the Maison Française, and completing a major historic renovation of the Maison Française. She curates and produces the programming of the Columbia Maison Française, working in collaboration with partners across Columbia, including the Department of French, Institute of African Studies, Alliance Program, European Institute, Department of History, School of the Arts, Heyman Center for the Humanities, SIPA, and Earth Institute. Shanny Peer was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 2023 and Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2016.
Fanny Guex is the Associate Director of the Columbia Maison Française. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She has researched and published on Travel Literature, Translation and Transcultural Encounters, Micro and Connected Histories. In particular, she studied three life trajectories of Swiss citizens that went to India for a long period at the time of the Indian Independence and wrote about their spirituel and transcultural experiences. You can access Fanny Guex's publications here.
Fanny Guex has also worked on the history of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. She is the cofounder of the Collective for the Upright Men (Abantu Bahagaze Bemye in Kinyarwanda and Les Hommes debout in French), an artistic and memorial project for the dignity of the victims and survivors of the genocide. For the 30th commemorations, she worked closely with the visual artist Bruce Clarke on the concept of Upright Women (Les Femmes debout, Abagore Bahagaze Bemye) in Kigali and Murambi.
Fanny Guex joined Columbia in January 2019 and gave birth to 2 little girls who learned to walk on the steps of Low Library.
Emilie Schlosser (Emi) is the 2024-2025 intern at Columbia Maison Française. They studied Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, where their Bachelor’s thesis examined the concept of Cinema-Liberation from a womanist perspective, focusing on the contributions of women and queer individuals to the Pan-African project.
Emi most recently obtained a Master’s degree in Art and Cultural Management from the International University of Catalonia in Barcelona. Their Master’s project focused on fostering sustainable opportunities and visibility for emerging artists from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, particularly emphasizing inter-artist diasporic collaboration.
Originally from Paris, Emi has spent the last five years living, studying, and working across the Netherlands, the UK, and Spain. They have gained experience in film festivals, contemporary art curation, and fashion projects, consistently advocating for diverse cultural expressions across various mediums.