Professor of French Angèle Kingué recently received the first-ever medal of honor from François Rabelais University (Université François-Rabelais) located in Tours, France.

The award recognizes Kingué’s contribution to the ongoing dialogue between the two universities and celebrates “her ceaseless work and effort to create the conditions where the collaboration between our two universities flourish,” Loic Valiant, the President of Université François-Rabelais, said.

The recognition “is proof that our partners appreciate our vision, our way of doing things, our commitment to the highest quality of exchange, and will continue to facilitate our integration into the university, the city and the region as they create more opportunities for Bucknell students to feel at home in Tours,” Kingué said.

Kingué was born and raised in Cameroon and went on to receive her bachelor’s degree in French and English language and literature at the University of Yaoundé, a master’s degree in applied linguistics at the University of North Wales in Bangor, and a Ph.D in French and Pedagogy and French at Pennsylvania State University. Kingué’s extensive education has led her to complete widespread research in foreign language pedagogy and African literature. She has also published one children’s story, two novels, and two collections of adolescent short stories. 

Kingué stresses the benefits students receive from bilingualism and biculturalism, which she believes “allows one to deepen their knowledge base at many levels, and thus be more able to open doors of opportunity for working and living that would otherwise be unavailable. To me, the teaching and learning of French represents the study of many other regions of the world such as West Africa and the Antilles where French is the official language … Through my course on Francophone African culture and literature, I have been able to introduce many of our French majors to a part of the world they may not have necessarily explored,” Kingué said.