Kevin Harrington

Kevin Harrington had a choice to make in middle school: Spanish or French as a foreign language. The Reading, Massachusetts, native noted that the Spanish students took a class trip to New York City, a place he’d already visited. The French students, meanwhile, visited Québec City in Canada, a place that intrigued him. French it was.

A decade later, Harrington is a French major at UMass Lowell who is spending the fall semester of his senior year studying abroad in Pau, a city at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains in southwestern France. He can’t wait.

“There’s so much that I’m excited for, not only in Pau but throughout Europe, which is just a train ride away,” says Harrington, a first-generation college student who will be studying at the University of Pau — with excursions planned for Paris, the French Riviera, Basque Country, Bordeaux and Barcelona. 

Originally a business major, Harrington switched to French during his sophomore year, with minors in education and business. A course he took with Assoc. Prof. of French and Francophone Studies Mercédès Baillargeon, called Gender and Sex in French Culture, was a “revelation” for Harrington.

“We kind of grow up in a bubble where we only think about ourselves, but that course gave me an understanding of how the world works and how people in other cultures think and act,” says Harrington, who found it interesting “how women and queer people are depicted in other forms of media.”

Harrington wrote an essay for the course on how Anne Garréta’s 1986 novel “Sphinx” pushed against the limits of conventional binary gender pronouns in the French language. The essay was published in Canal, an interdisciplinary, multilingual journal of undergraduate work from the Department of World Languages and Cultures.

Impressed by Harrington’s work, Baillargeon invited him to become her undergraduate research assistant for her project on Québec cinema, “Missed Connections: (Post/Trans)Nationalism, Intimacy and Identity in Contemporary Québec Cinema.” They have co-authored several essays and papers, including one that they presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston.

“That was a transformative experience because I was the only undergrad there,” Harrington says. “People appreciated what I had to say, and I was obviously appreciative of what they had to say.”

Harrington says working with Baillargeon has helped him define his career goals.

“I want to do what Prof. Baillargeon does: academic research, publishing and teaching,” he says.

Harrington is vice president of the French Club and has worked for SNL Sports Academy, which provides after-school programs for kids in local communities.

“That helped me double down on my decision to become a teacher because I could see the impact that programs like these are having on kids in disadvantaged communities,” he says.

Once Harrington completes his degree, he may return to France to take part in a government-funded teaching assistant program.

All because of a fateful choice he made in middle school.

“French is a difficult language to learn, but it’s not very difficult to understand,” Harrington says. “I have absolutely no French heritage in me, but I like French music and movies and culture because of the accessibility they give me to so many other groups of people.”