Image: © Kimberly Frohreich
Author: Sophie Buhler and Nicole Hlavova
Nicky: Hi! So, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from and how long you’ve been in Switzerland?
Kimberly: I’m from Orange County, California.I grew up right next to Disneyland actually!
Sophie: Oh, wow. That’s really cool!
K: Yeah, it was fun. I did my bachelor’s at UC Santa Cruz, and I studied French in high school. So, what brought me here is that my parents asked me if I wanted to spend a summer abroad in France, and of course I said yes! I was 16 and I struck gold by getting a host family in Nice with two host sisters: one a year older and one a year younger. The family took me all over the French Riviera that summer. It was like a dream come true for a 16-year-old from California.
That kept me going with the language and I wanted to come back. And so, I did my year abroad in Grenoble. For a lot of American college students it’s kind of a rite of passage to spend some time abroad. So I spent my junior year in Grenoble, and I met someone! After finishing my degree in the US, I moved back over here. We were in Lyon at first, but then I ended up enrolling at the University of Geneva to continue my studies in order to teach English. But my bachelor’s wasn’t worth as much here, so I basically had to start over. That was back in 2003 before the university changed to the bachelor’s/master’s system.
That’s when I met Professor Soltysik-Monnet. I took a couple of seminars with her and loved them. I also met Professor Madsen around that time, who’s still a professor of American literature at the University of Geneva. I then continued to do my master’s there and, then an assistantship opened up under Professor Madsen and I applied and got it! So all of that meant that I was staying here.
My PhD stemmed from my mémoire, which was kind of fun, and it’s topical again now, considering the movie Wicked just came out. My first conference was organized by Professor Soltysik-Monnet with one of her old colleagues in Geneva. I was wondering if it was that one (Kimberly points to a poster in the office). It might’ve been that one right there, yes, in 2008, Writing American Women: Text, Gender, Performance. That was my first conference! I was still a master’s student at the time, but I gave a paper and went on to submit it for publication. And so that was also my first publication, which was about the figure of the Wicked Witch of the West. The musical Wicked, the Broadway musical, had just come out at the time. So I followed that figure’s progression in the original Wizard of Oz text, the 1939 film, the novel that Wicked was based on and then the musical.
S: Oh, that’s really cool!
K: Yeah, it might be fun to go back, rework that and publish a kind of follow-up paper with the current film. It’s just that I’m working on other projects right now, so we’ll see if that actually happens. But that conference paper was the basis for my master’s thesis which I did with Professor Madsen. I ended up writing about, not just the Wicked Witch, but the whole fairy tale of The Wizard of Oz: the different adaptations and what they said about gender, sexuality, the body, and the figure of the freak. So also looking at the body through disability studies.
My PhD, which I finished fairly recently, was kind of in line with that but focusing more on race, looking at adaptations and rewritings of the figure of the monster: what they say about race and how we think about race now.
N: That’s really interesting.
S: Have you noticed many differences between studying in America and studying in Switzerland?
K: I can speak a little bit from my experience in France as well as in the U.S. as a bachelor’s student. In literature… well first of all, in the U.S. you have to do ‘general education requirements’. I don’t know if it’s the same as in the UK?
S: Um, in the UK you have to get your GCSEs in at least Maths and English, I’m pretty sure.
K: And that’s at the university level?
S: No, no, that’s when you are 16. I think past 16 you’re sort of free. You have to do an apprenticeship if you don’t go to school until you’re 18. But I think that’s it.
N: Yeah, and there’s nothing fixed at uni.You kind of just do whatever you want!
K: Okay. Well, at university in the U.S., you have to do almost two years’ worth of general education requirements. So, if you choose something in the humanities as a major, then you have to do a lot of general education requirements in science or math, that sort of thing.So for instance, I took a class on the rainforest and another on oceanography.
S: Ooh!
K: Yeah, they were interesting. But it’s a very different approach to how you should be spending your time as a university student. Over there, the idea in education is to have well-rounded graduates who know a little bit of everything. So obviously, you spend less time on your major, which is partly why I only ended up getting half a bachelor’s worth of transfer credits in English when I moved here.
I majored in literature. It could be as intense as reading a novel a week per class! But it meant that there wasn’t much close reading. So, it was more about exposure and I found that a lot of the classes were ‘tell us how you feel about this book’ – that sort of thing. It was very open.
N: Oh really! It was the same for us in the UK, that’s why I prefer it here because you actually go into it.
S: Yeah, yeah. We’d have like a book a module each week which was just too much content!
K: It’s intense. Yeah. It’s really intense. Then, in France, there was this stark opposition, where it was a whole semester, one class was focused on one book. And a lot of intense close reading, which I really liked.
I found that Geneva was this nice sort of in-between where it was like three novels each semester. Professor Madsen at the time, and Professor Soltysik-Monnet, depending on what they were teaching, also integrated film and television in their classes. I just loved that. I’d say they were both my mentors. And Switzerland felt like this nice middle ground, in terms of the amount of reading and digging a bit deeper.
N: That’s really interesting! So, can you tell us a little bit about what you are currently working on?
K: Yeah. So, what I’m currently working on – with the very little time that I have because I’m at 80% as a high school teacher and I have two kids – I’m trying to turn my thesis into a book. I was in touch with a publisher, a university press in the U.S. before Trump got elected. This was last year, and they seemed interested. But I didn’t manage to send off the manuscript. And now, Trump has been elected and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that they’re going to be interested anymore because of how much the book will deal with race. So, I think I’m going to have to look elsewhere, to a European or UK publisher maybe.
N: That’s frustrating!
N: Yeah. That’s awful that it can affect sort of that sort of thing!
K: Yeah. At the same time though, I’m thinking, thank goodness I didn’t try for a job in the U.S.! Because at one point when I was heading towards finishing my thesis, and the assistantship in Geneva was ending, I sort of had to think about what was going to be the smartest move. My husband had already gotten a tenured position as a teacher in Geneva and so that seemed to be the smartest move, you know, to head in a direction with job security. And maybe try to do some university and academic interests on the side.
That’s one of the reasons I opted for 80%, so that I would be able to teach at university from time to time. But yeah, there was that question in the back of my mind – should I look for jobs in the U.S.? My husband had suggested applying because he loves going there. Oh, he’s French by the way and we live in France. Of course, he wasn’t telling me to apply in Nebraska! He was hoping for Hawaii, California, if I could find something in those areas. And I was just thinking, well, let me try to get the book published! And now I’m thinking it’s just too crazy over there. I’ve heard a lot of people are leaving academia now.
S: Do you miss America much?
K: A little bit, yeah. Mm-hmm. Every time you go home, there’s this idea of needing to “recharge the batteries.” I’m sure you know how that feels. But there are things that drive me crazy when I go there.
S: For sure. Is there anything you prefer about living in France in comparison to living in America?
K: Yes. Not having to worry about school shootings, especially now that I have young children. I lost a university friend in a mass shooting actually. And I know two other people who were present at two other shootings.
S: I’m so sorry to hear about your friend, it’s so unfortunate that this isn’t an uncommon situation in America.
N: That’s so awful to hear. I can see how France is more appealing to live with children from a safety perspective.
K: Then there’s the price of healthcare. What else? I suppose it kind of depends on where you live. My family and I live in a place in France where we can do a lot on foot, a lot of our shopping on foot and I love that. I love the history and the culture of the town we live in.
N: That sounds really nice. Yeah, because in America you have to drive a lot, don’t you?
K: Yeah. Well, especially in Los Angeles. In the 1980s, my parents were a young couple in LA and they told me there was this initiative on a ballot to get more public transport. There was just this huge amount of lobbying from the car companies so that it wouldn’t go through, so people would just keep buying cars and building more freeways. And yeah, it didn’t go through.
S: That’s crazy.
N: So… what do you do for fun!
K: What do I do for fun?
S: Any hobbies?
K: As a working mom? Haha. Um, gosh. Well, I’m a dancer. I’ve done ballet dancing since I was five. I don’t know if I should use the present tense because I don’t do it very much anymore. I do more contemporary, a mix of contemporary, modern, and Pilates. It’s a very hybrid sort of dance class that I take.
S: Is that like a bar class type thing?
K: Not even, no. I’ve had to give up ballet because of back problems. So it’s a class that has more stretching and is better for the back. Otherwise, my husband is a singer, and I come from a family of singers as well, so there’s music at home and sometimes I participate with him and we make music, yeah!
S: That’s lovely!
K: I don’t if there’s anything else. It feels like I don’t have time to read very much for pleasure, unfortunately, but I also enjoy cooking.
S: Yeah. Do you have a favourite spot in Lausanne to visit… or in Geneva?
K: Yeah, because I’m not in Lausanne very much. In Geneva, where do I like to go? Hmm.
S: Or France!
K: Let me think about that, hmm, my favourite places to go… Well, I do like the lake. Lovely. And actually, okay, Bains des Pâquis in Geneva. I really like to go there to have lunch, they have really nice fresh food there. Whenever we have visitors, that’s the place I like to take them, I just think that the ambiance is really cool and to go swimming there as well. But otherwise with my children, my two boys, we go to Annecy and swim there.
N: Yeah, swimming in the lake is what I’m really looking forward to in the summer. I’m really excited!
K: I know!
S: Yeah, it sounds gorgeous, I haven’t swum in the lake yet so I’m really excited to when it gets warmer!
K: Yeah. It’s really nice.
N: Although Christmas time here is lovely as well.
S: Yeah. So nice with the markets.
N: And then aside from French, do you speak any other languages?
K: No, I did take Spanish when I was a university student in California. At the time, I thought I was going to stay there and become a high school English teacher there. I was advised to learn Spanish, but it went away without practice.
N: I see.
S: Yeah, it’s hard. Do you have any movie, song or book recommendations to conclude the interview?
K: Let’s see. I’m trying to think of something that I’ve read lately that I’ve enjoyed. It’s funny because I read the MUSE interview with Elvis Coimbra Gomes, they used to be one of my students actually. There was some question like that, and I remember thinking, I need to think of something in advance, but I forgot to! I do listen to a lot of audio books because I do a lot of driving. Okay, maybe there’s some in my library that I’ve listened to.
N: Are they more for fun? Those ones?
K: There’s a mixture. I started listening to James by Percival Everett. Ooh, I have one I could recommend. It’s not like last year recent, but Frankissstein, it’s a sort of contemporary take on Frankenstein. I think it’s a British author, Jeanette Winterson and she has two timelines. She dramatizes the moment that Mary Shelley is writing the novel and then brings in this Victor Frankenstein-like character who’s creating cyborg robots that people are buying. That part is narrated by a transgender doctor. Yeah, it’s really, really interesting.
S: That sounds really good actually. Okay brilliant! Thank you so much. And thank you so much for doing the interview as well. We really appreciate it.
N: Yeah, thank you!
