Over the years, in explaining the backstory behind my book, The French Desk: A Brooklyn Gal’s Journey into Wartime Propaganda, I would mention that my mother had participated in the Paris Study Group to my friends, and they would invariably say, “What was that?”
The Paris Study Group (PSG) was a group of catholic college women (about 20 per year), who travelled to France for their junior year abroad, lived with a French family and studied at either the Sorbonne or the Catholic Institute of Paris. The students came from all over the world. The program ran between 1928 and 1940.
The PSG Founder and Director, Miss Erin Samson, was born to a French father and an Irish mother and grew up in in Washington, DC. As a young girl, Miss Samson traveled to France often to visit her father’s relatives and ended up attending college there, earning her French Baccalaureate at the Catholic Universite of Angers. Miss Samson also went on to study in England, earning advanced literature degrees at Oxford. Continue reading “The Paris Study Group – A Defining Year”