“There was some hesitation,” says Marie Papineschi, a native of Montpellier, France, “when my dad invited me to join him in the U.S. back in 2004.” Marie’s father was participating in a faculty exchange and would teach for a semester in the Department of English at the University of Iowa. “We didn’t quite get along,” she explains. The then-sixteen-year-old reluctantly agreed to accompany her father, only to fall in love with Iowa City. While riding her bike to City High in the mornings, she noticed virtually everyone she passed would wave or say hello. “I came home from school and asked, ‘Dad, do we know all these people?’ Of course, we didn’t. Everyone was just so friendly.”

Marie arranged to stay in Iowa City after her dad returned to France. (A boy in her French class agreed to ask his parents to host her in exchange for a list of bad words in her native tongue.) She thrived at City High and, later, at Kirkwood Community College. Fascinated by dreams and the notion of multiple personalities,
she flirted with becoming a Psychology major until an inspiring English class revealed to her just how passionate she could be about literature. “I was about to take an essay exam on J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories,” she recalls, “and I had an incredible epiphany—complete with visual images—about how I was going to pull the nine narratives together. I ended up writing a six-page essay in an hour.”

With her true calling now clear, Marie transferred from Kirkwood to the University of Iowa and became an English major. Now finishing her senior year, she is at work on her honors thesis, an analysis of the book of Genesis as a literary work. A serious reader, the Dostoevsky fan is as protective of books as she is passionate about them. “My number one rule,” she says, “is to read a text on its own terms. Since I’ve been at the University of Iowa, I’ve never read a book I didn’t like. That’s because I believe in letting a text be and breathe. I don’t wish it to be something else; I find meaning in what’s there.”

This is an approach Marie hopes to carry into graduate school, where she intends to study the Old Testament while earning a PhD, and into her subsequent work as a professor. In response to comments that she is following in her father’s footsteps, Marie grins. “The fact is, my father and I are a lot alike,” she says, “despite two decades of rebellion.”