Cleveland, Ohio, a city with steel-framed architecture, was where Hannah Hughes felt a spark of love for French blooming. From growing up in Cleveland, to getting her PhD, French teacher Hannah Hughes has pursued her love for the French language.
Hughes started learning French in eighth grade. Despite nobody in her family speaking French, Hughes discovered that she loved learning the language.
“My school had an introductory course in French because they were trying to get more interest in the French program,” Hughes said, “I really liked it, so I kept studying it in high school.”
(Saaya Patel)
Hughes further immersed herself in the culture of French when her family hosted a French exchange student to live with them. The exchange students went to high school with her for two to three weeks and she wanted to be able to have a conversation between each other.
“They were very cool,” Hughes said. “I enjoyed meeting the students, and I just wanted to be able to communicate with them.”
Along with French, Hughes has also studied two other languages. She minored in Italian during her undergrad at Kent State University and learned Spanish in graduate school.
“I studied abroad in Columbia,” Hughes said, “My husband is also Guatemalan and I speak Spanish with his family.”
She studied abroad in France several times during both undergrad and graduate school to do research about racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people about their experiences in France.
“I did research in a fanzine archive,” Hughes said. “They’re like little comic books that are handmade. So I went through and took lots of pictures of those, and wrote about them.”
After her research on the fanzine archives, she decided to get her PhD in French literature about the challenges minorities face everyday. Most of the fanzines she reviewed were about African American families who immigrated to France.
“African Americans were not the normative French identity,” Hughes said.”They may have struggled with their identity because of that and I found how that showed up in their writing.”
Outside of teaching, she hikes and does Latin and partner dancing. She hiked her longest trail in 2022 which was 485 miles long.
“I hiked the Colorado Trail,” Hughes said. “You meet people along the way, forming a group and getting to know other people. I want to do more stuff like it. It would be really cool to hike the Appalachian Trail someday.”
Hughes taught in both college and high school before finding her way to CHS. Though she liked both, she does have a favorite.
“I really like teaching high school because I get to know my students better,” Hughes said. “I get to see them all through graduation, see their progress and get to know them as people.”
