AUBURN — Mary Rice-DeFosse, professor of French and chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Bates College, will be the speaker at a meeting of the Androscoggin Historical Society at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 16, in the society’s headquarters, on the third floor of the County Courthouse, Court and Turner streets. The public is invited to attend without charge. An elevator is available.

Rice-DeFosse will discuss the work of the Grey Nuns (Sisters of Charity) during the first half of the 20th century and briefly review the nuns’ contributions in the 19th century. These included teaching in Lewiston’s first parochial school in 1882 and helping to found St. Mary’s, the first hospital in Lewiston, in 1889.

Rice-DeFosse did her doctoral work at Yale University and at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. She specializes in French literature of the 19th century, revolution and social change. She has published on George Sand, Flora Tristan, Marie d’Agoult, Charles Nodier and Gustave Flaubert, and was a co-editor for “A Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature” and more recently, co-edited a special volume of “Women in French Studies,” with Cathy Yandell.

She is past president of Women in French, an international professional organization which is allied to the Modern Language Association that supports research on women writers of French expression, and serves on its executive committee.

She serves on the boards of directors of the Franco-American Collection at the University of Southern Maine – Lewiston-Auburn College and the Franco-American Heritage Center.