Courville was raised in Opelousas, Louisiana and served as secretary of her town's NAACP chapter when she was 15 years old.
Ambassador Courville graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a B.A. and M.A. in political science and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Denver's Graduate School of International Studies (now the Josef Korbel School of International Studies), in comparative politics and international relations [REF].