FYSA Georgia Tech-Europe
Program staff
Faculty Director
Dr. Jennifer Orth-Veillon
After graduating from James Madison University in Virginia, Jennifer Orth-Veillon, Ph.D. moved to Paris and taught in French schools through the Fulbright English assistant program. She stayed on for six more years, working in French companies. She also completed a Master of Arts degree in Modern Letters at the Université of Paris VII.
In 2004, she returned to the United States and obtained her doctorate in Comparative Literature at Emory University. She was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Gatech, Atlanta in the Writing and Communication Program before going back to France in 2015, this time to Lyon. From 2016-2023, she taught humanities and creative writing courses in various establishments including École Normale Supérieur de Lyon, University Studies Abroad Consortium Lyon, Université Catholique de Lyon, Centre d’études franco-américain de management, and École catholique des arts et métiers Lyon.
In addition to pursuing her passion for innovative pedagogy and traveling with students, she is a freelance journalist, film translator, and novel writer. A specialist in the literature of war, she edited Beyond Their Limits of Longing: Contemporary Writers and Veterans on the Lingering Stories of WWI, published by MilSpeak books in 2022. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The War Horse, L’Esprit, Les cahiers du judaïsme, Consequence Magazine, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. With her Franco-American background, she is delighted to be at Georgia Tech Europe to lead students through a one-of-a-kind first semester in France.
Assistant Director
Yvonne Medina, Ph.D.
Yvonne Medina is Assistant Director of First-Year Semester Abroad (FYSA) and Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech.She earned her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Florida and has a bachelor’s degree in English and French literature from Bryn Mawr College.
Her research interests include nineteenth century Anglophone children’s literature, disability studies, and castaway novels. Other research interests include boyhood studies and Francophone children’s literature. Her writing has appeared in Children’s Literature in Education, Children’s Literature Quarterly, and various public humanities outlets. She frequently teaches communication courses focused on food studies, which is a passion of hers. Her pedagogy emphasizes multimodal communication and is responsive to the needs of varied learning styles and neurotypes.
In addition to academia, Dr. Medina has worked in academic and public libraries, early education settings, and translation. As an undergraduate, she thoroughly enjoyed studying abroad in Paris for a semester where she also volunteered to teach French students English as a second language. Her passion for French culture and cross- cultural exchange makes her excited to work with Georgia Tech students as they begin their first semester of studies in Metz, France.