Globe-Trotting
Her globe-trotting career took her to more countries than most people visit in a lifetime, but for Doggett, traveling and living abroad wasn’t new. Because of her father’s work for USAID, she grew up in Greece, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Kenya, learning French and picking up conversational Thai and Swahili along the way.
She now considers this early exposure to foreign languages and cultures a throughline in her lifelong passion for linguistics.
At Swarthmore, Doggett thought she would pursue a major in math. But then she took a course with professor and eventual College President Alfred H. Bloom and she realized her “true love” was linguistics.
She decided to special major in the subject — there wasn’t yet a linguistics major — and French, writing a thesis on a poem by the infamously cryptic 19th-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé.
“It was a nearly impossible topic,” recalls Doggett, who entered Swarthmore with the Class of ’76 but obtained her degree in 1980.
Among Doggett’s first jobs after Swarthmore were stints as managing editor at two trade publications in Washington, D.C. She eventually landed a position at the Washington Post while pursuing a master’s degree in sociolinguistics.
But her dream was to live in Paris, and working for the English desk of a French news agency was her best chance to do so. So she took an opening at AFP’s Hong Kong office and waited for a job to open in Paris.
Her experience with the varied tones of Thai helped her learn Cantonese. She was given some of her first reporting assignments there, including one that landed her in a middle-of-the-night convoy with members of the Afghan mujahideen on their way to assume control of Kabul in 1992. During the hours-long drive from Peshawar, Pakistan, she remembers the headlights illuminating cairns — piles of stones topped with red flags that indicated undetonated mines — on the side of the road and the drivers shouting at those ahead of them to stay in line.
“My mother was happy I didn’t tell her about that until way later,” Doggett says.
It was 1992 when she at last headed to Paris, where she worked for the next 30 years, save for a four-year stint as AFP’s Rome correspondent.
Recently retired and living in Amboise, a small town in the Loire Valley, with her French husband, she continues to immerse herself in language. She recently took a job freelancing for a regional newspaper — her first time writing in French.
“It’s fun and it gives me an entrée into the whole community,” she says.
She is also keeping up her Italian — to her, it’s “the most beautiful language” — with weekly tutoring sessions.
“I’ve always loved language,” she says, “and I always will.”