Leadership Team
Christophe Landry
Ph.D - University of Sussex (Brighton, UK)
Email: Christophe@LouisianaCreoleDictionary.com
Christophe Landry, a North American academician,
is a polyglot and language, culture and human rights advocate with multi-generational ties to French, Spanish and American Louisiana. An honors graduate
from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Francophone Studies and Linguistics, with a minor in Germanic Studies,
under the tutelage of renown Louisiana socio-cultural anthropologist and linguist Dr. Barry Jean Ancelet. Landry’s mentors—Drs. Deborah Clifton, Richard
Winters, Leslie Bary, Vaughan Burdin Baker, and Richard Guidry, Elaine Clément, Jolène Adam, Philippe Gustin, Janet Colson, Danielle Fontenette—have been
at the forefront of Louisiana scholarship and preservation efforts for more than half a century. Landry has been a lifelong advocate of Francophone and
Creolophone research and language initiatives, beginning at New Iberia Senior High School, where he provided morning announcements in French and organized
the Causeries d’Ibérie—a weekly French language roundtable—and served as a member of the New Iberia Downtown Development, Sister Cities, and Main Street
Programs. His direct involvement with the municipal government played a vital role in the passage of legislation to erect trilingual signage in Downtown
New Iberia. Landry culminated his post-secondary studies with an appointment to the first Parlement francophone des Jeunes, or the Global Youth
Francophone Parliament, which assembled in Ontario and Quebec, Canada, in 2001.
Now a doctoral student at the University of Sussex, in the United
Kingdom, Landry has been steeped in primary source documentation of twentieth century shifts in the cultural history of Creole Louisiana. His
professional career leading up to graduate school involved working as a legal French interpreter for Haik, Minvielle and Grubbs Law Firm;
organizing the 2001 Creole Heritage Educational Research Society (CHERS) Conference in New Orleans; serving as a cultural liaison for the
Vermillionville Historic Village and a docent and genealogist, respectively, for the Acadian Memorial and the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center.
Landry founded the Learn Louisiana Creole website in 2007, and offered the first virtual tutorials in the language two years later as part of an online
platform. In 2009, he was appointed Interim Program Director for the World Studies Institute of Louisiana, organizing international virtual learning
initiatives between Francophone students in Louisiana and in the larger French-speaking world. And in 2010, Landry spearheaded social media efforts to
document Louisiana Creole in federal censorial literature and created a Virtual Classroom for the Louisiana Creole language on
Facebook in 2011.
