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 – Europe and North America. She has managed to maximize her students’ 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’s 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’s 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’s 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 “new” 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 AL. I. Cuza din Iasi | MA in French and Francophone Studies, Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza din Iasi | BA in Modern Languages; Tchg French and English as Foreign Lang, Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza din Iasi