Regular blog readers will notice that there’s something of a pattern to when posts go up here, with a flurry of articles and news in the build-up to new semesters and then over the first few weeks but then, as work intensifies for everyone, the pace of posts slows a bit. And then suddenly it’s the mid-semester break and there’s a little bit more time for some updates before teaching starts again, and we realise that there are lots of snippets of news to pass on so here goes.
Teaching in French at Stirling has all been online for the first half of this semester and, as was the case last year, we’ve all been impressed and pleased by how well our students have adapted to the online environment. It’s not easy for any of us and, speaking for everyone in the French at Stirling teaching team, we’re really missing being back in the classroom, chatting to students, bumping into people between classes… However, for the time being, everything remains online and will do until the end of teaching in April, at least, and we’re grateful to our students for their patience and enthusiasm.
As well as adapting to our own Stirling teaching online, for our Semester 6 students, there has been a very particular process of adaptation because, under normal circumstances, most of them would have been away on Study Abroad this semester. However, given the current situation, that wasn’t possible. Instead, our Semester 6 students are benefitting from extra conversation sessions organised by our language team, as well as attending online classes at our partner institutions across France, at the Universities of Lorraine, Aix-Marseille and Tours, as well as at ESSEC Business School and Sciences-Po (Paris, Menton and Dijon).
That’s not to say it’s always straightforward for these students. As Nela, a Semester 6 International Management with European Languages and Society student explains: ‘Studying abroad during the pandemic has been a bit challenging, especially in the beginning. I had trouble figuring out the new platform and the work methodology of the Université de Lorraine. What has been extremely useful, though, was setting up a Facebook messenger group with the rest of the people from Stirling that are going through the same process than me. We can support eachother, chat about our new lecturers, and stay more engaged that way!’ A good bit of intercultural understanding to apply but, as ever, our students are rising to the challenge and finding ways to work through the current circumstances.
What else? Well, earlier in the semester, our colleague, Fiona Barclay, gave a fantastic research paper to our Literature and Languages seminar series entitled ‘Instrumentalising ghosts: the case of the French settlers of Algeria’. Fiona’s paper examined the ways in which the pied-noir community in France represents the present-day embodiment of the colonial legacies which continue to haunt the Mediterranean space between the modern nations of France and Algeria. Our PhD student Fraser McQueen’s excellent article ‘Christophe Guilluy’s France Périphérique and the absence of race from Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine’ has just been published in Modern and Contemporary France. Nina Parish just gave a paper with Emma Wagstaff (Birmingham) on ‘Editing Bilingual Poetry Anthologies in 2020’ as part the Extended Conference on ‘Interpreting 21st-Century Poetry’, organised by La Sapienza University in Rome, the Universitá di Siena, the University of Warwick and the journal Polisemie. And, just before the mid-semester break, Hannah Grayson co-organised a workshop on ‘Languages of Disease in the Contemporary Francophone World’, under the auspices of the IMLR in London, in collaboration with Steven Wilson of Queen’s University Belfast.
And looking ahead to the rest of the semester, what do we have coming up? Nina Parish is organising a translation apéro to mark International Women’s Day on 8th March, in collaboration with Sandra Daroczi at Bath and involving students from both institutions. Julie Hugonny and our PhD student Lauren Kenny are also organising a series of events that we’ll be hosting over the last three weeks of March around the theme of French Sci-Fi. Events and activities will include a talk on the origins of French sci-fi by Julie, a round-table discussion/Q&A on a French sci-fi film that Elizabeth Ezra will also be part of, and a fun quiz/games session. And Jean-Michel DesJacques and Cristina Johnston have been working with one of our Year 2 French and Spanish students, Beth, who is applying for a Stevenson Exchange Scholarship for next year. On croise les doigts!
More news to come over the weeks ahead (including, I’m delighted to say, updates from students, past and present) but there we go, for starters!
French at Stirling 