"I went to a French school in New York," she notes. "I've grown up bicultural. It almost seems like fate."
Schor's artist parents were refugees who moved from Poland to Paris to the United States at the time of World War II. She says the family would likely have remained in France if not for the war.
"I often imagine what my life would have been like had I grown up in Paris," she says.
Although Schor majored in English at Barnard College at Columbia, she switched to French when she applied to graduate school. She received her Ph.D. from Yale.
Since graduating, she has taught at Columbia, Brown, Duke and, finally, Harvard.
"I feel like I've finally been accepted to Harvard. I applied to Radcliffe and wasn't accepted," she says. "I feel like a kid in a candy store."