Just before the final curtain falls on the UK participation in the Erasmus programme at the end of May 23, our Language Coordinator, Jean-Michel DesJacques, was able to take part in a staff mobility exchange with two of our partners in France, AMU (Aix Marseille Université) and UVDP (Université Via Domitia in Perpignan), de la Provence au pays catalan. It went very quickly as always when you have a good time, but we’re very pleased that he’s agreed to share some of the highlights from his trip:
“First of all, as the person responsible for sending our language students abroad, it was most useful to meet colleagues in person, see the locations, campuses, getting a feel of the two cities. I am grateful to staff at both universities for their welcome, for giving up some of their precious time to show me around and for their insight on our current bilateral agreements. We concluded that we were very much attached to our respective partnerships and there was a clear determination from all sides that our valued exchanges should continue. In a way, this was the crucial part of my visit: making sure we can carry on sending students via our renewed bilateral agreements. We did talk a lot about the visa situation, its impact on the registration process and how it acts almost as a deterrent for some continental students. Et c’est bien dommage! Having said that I did meet Vincent from Perpignan who is keen on joining us in Spring 24 as part of the exchange.
More importantly, it was a golden opportunity to meet with students in a completely different environment and having a chat in a relaxed atmosphere was very precious, to me anyway. By relaxed atmosphere, I mean chatting in French at a terrasse of a nice café (with thanks to Kaye for the box of Madeleine cakes, Marcel Proust would have been proud). I am very grateful to all our students who attended courses at Aix and Perpignan for taking time to meet me, some had visiting family members, others had upcoming exams or apartment to vacate. So many thanks again.
The end of Erasmus means the end of staff mobility, too, as it is not a feature that the new Turing scheme will offer so particular hanks to Jennifer and Jo from the International Office at Stirling for making this trip possible for me.”
It seems fitting to post this article on 31 May, the final day of Erasmus for us at Stirling. Our colleagues and students have benefitted so much from the scheme over the years and we’ve been lucky enough to welcome colleagues and students from many of our partner institutions to Stirling, too. We really hope to be able to find a way to maintain these relationships over the months and years ahead and to continue to benefit from the friendships and connections we’ve all built thanks to Erasmus.
Last Friday members of the French programme met to mark the end of Dr Ashley Harris‘s time at Stirling. Ashley arrived in Stirling in July 2022 to take up a role as Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Fiona Barclay‘s AHRC Follow-on Funding ‘Remembering Empire‘ project. She has previously worked at the University of Surrey, where she was a Teaching Fellow in French Studies, and at Queen’s University Belfast, where she lectured for three years following the completion of her PhD there.
At Belfast Ashley was the recruitment lead for French, including schools outreach and event organisation. That experience stood her in good stead on ‘Remembering Empire’, where the project team created and delivered two new courses to pupils of different ages across seven schools. Ashley also worked with our six wonderful student mentors and, with schools across Stirling and Glasgow, she did plenty of travelling!
As well as working on ‘Remembering Empire’, Ashley supported the French team at Stirling, teaching our first and second year language and culture modules, as well as supervising research projects and examining in oral language assessments. In April we had the chance to hear about her research on the ‘media author’, when she talked about her work on French authors Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq and Frédéric Beigbeder at one of the Division of Literature and Language’s research seminars.
Ashley is leaving us to work on completing a book based on her research. We’re sorry to see her go but can’t wait to read it!
Teaching may be over for this academic year in French at Stirling but there’s still plenty going on, including, very recently, a trip to the theatre for some of our students with our colleagues Mathilde Mazau and Hannah Grayson. As Mathilde explains: “I read all of Édouard Louis last summer and I was excited when I found out that Who Killed My Father, the play version of Qui a tué mon père, was showing in Glasgow. It is Louis’s third book and a furious criticism of how the political elite vote laws that will literally cause people and workers to die younger. It is also a declaration of love to his ill father and a touching account of their troubled relationship.
Hannah and I met our students Jemima, Christie, Tom, and Jegan at the Platform theatre in Easterhouse. I had read Qui a tué mon père again that day, in preparation for the play, and to refresh my memory. We chatted about the book before getting into the theatre. The play is a dramatised, almost word-for-word rendition of Qui a tué mon père. The mise-en-scène is pared down to just a few objects, bits of furniture and photos of prominent French political figures of the last couple of decades. I was moved by the one-man performance of Michael Marcus who really succeeded in conveying both the urgency of Louis’s message, and the underlying tenderness in the text. Who Killed My Father as a play is as powerful as the book itself.”
As for the students who attended, over to Tom, who is just finishing his first year with us: “When we studied Édouard Louis’s excellent Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father) in our first semester of first-year French at Stirling this year, I don’t think any of us expected to be watching an English-language version of a play based on the book a few months later; but that’s exactly what happened.
Presented by the theatre company Surrogate, and performed in Platform, an arts centre in Easterhouse in Glasgow’s East End, the play was a very literal English translation of the book’s original French. It was a solo performance, using a monologue style to effectively reflect the use of first-person narrative in the book, with the sparse staging adding further to the feeling of intimacy this approach established with the audience. Simple lighting techniques and props heightened this further.
What those of us who were lucky enough to be there enjoyed, was an excellent adaptation of the book. Michael Marcus, performing as Louis on stage, conveyed the full range of emotions portrayed within the book, from anger to pathos, all underpinned by the themes of injustice that are so central to Louis’s story. The book ends with a damning inditement of French politics, and its impact on the life of Louis’s father, and the production did a fantastic job of conveying this, using nothing more complex than photographs of politicians as props to effectively support Michael Marcus’s powerful delivery.
While it was, at times, slightly surreal seeing a book that we’d studied in French class being performed in Glasgow, it was a fantastic production. If you get the chance, I’d really recommend you go and see this. If it then tempts you to read the book, even better.
I’d like to give a huge ‘merci beaucoup’ to Hannah Grayson of the university’s French department for organising and arranging the trip, and to the university for covering the cost of the tickets.”
Many thanks to Mathilde, Tom and Hannah for putting together this blog post (and to Hannah and Mathilde for organising the trip!) and we look forward to more tales of our students’ adventures in French at (and beyond!) Stirling over the coming weeks.
This is an exceptional opportunity for a strong PhD student to make an important contribution to knowledge about Scotland’s evolving languages landscape and we warmly encourage applications from candidates with a grounding in areas related to languages and education.
The award is available on a full-time basis for a period of 3 years and 6 months, from 1st October 2023 until 31st March 2027. It includes an annual stipend of £18,622, plus a CDA allowance of £600 towards travel costs to the partner organisation. The successful applicant may also apply for additional funding directly from SGSAH to attend conferences and undertake additional skills development.
If this sounds like you, please see the advert for full details. And get your applications in quickly – the deadline is 5 June 2023!
Another week, another blog post, and this time one which, courtesy of our colleague Hannah Grayson, will take us across the Atlantic to the buzz of academic conferences:
“Back in March I attended the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Niagara Falls (New York state). This is a huge conference that brings together lots of scholars and postgraduate students working across languages and literatures. The theme this year was ‘resilience’, which is central to my research on writing in the aftermath of crisis. I presented a paper on two novels that look at civil war in Côte d’Ivoire: Quand on refuse on dit non (Ahmadou Kourouma, 2005) and Matins de couvre-feu (Tanella Boni, 2005). In these novels, characters cope with the insecurity and surveillance that comes with civil war by navigating rural and urban landscapes through networks of solidarity. I argued that this moves away from the kind of autonomy that can often be assumed when people are asked to be ‘resilient’. That is to say, rather than writing characters who are self-sufficient, consistently strong, and hardy, Kourouma and Boni’s characters demonstrate a conscious débrouillardise (or wily expertise) in drawing on the relationships they have with others. This paper is going to be published as a chapter in an edited volume on critical perspectives on humanities and resilience next year.
Beyond the excellent conference papers, a highlight for me was meeting other scholars who are working on similar themes. Some of these people will be speaking at a research workshop I’m organising in Stirling in September, but more on that another time. Here are the waterfalls!
A few weeks ago I flew back across the Atlantic for a conference at the Université de Montréal. This was based on the work of Tierno Monénembo, a Guinean author who I have been researching for a very long time. So I was particularly excited to spend two days discussing all kinds of things in his novels: presentations covered community in his novels, how he interacts with Guinea’s history, the circulation of objects, the particular use of bars as discursive sites, and the use of music in his Cuban novel. I presented on two novels: Bled and Saharienne Indigo. In both of these novels, a girl protagonist is on the run, and has to work out ways of escaping (by stealing cars, hitching a ride in a poultry van, riding on a donkey). My paper discussed the recurring trope of the wheel in these novels, and how we can use it to understand the cyclical nature of violence experienced by the women Monénembo writes about. The paper was taken from the final chapter of a book I’m working on this summer called Nomads’ Land, all about characters on the move in Monénembo’s fiction. Also hopefully being published next year!
Montréal was full of pleasant surprises. The biggest one of all was meeting the former president of Guinea who came to part of our conference and, it turns out, is a close friend of Monénembo! Also great street art!”
Many thanks to Hannah for the blog post and the pictures, and we look forward to seeing Nomads’ Land in print next year!
Continuing with this week’s accidental blog theme, it’s great to be able to post this update from one of our recent graduates, Nicole, who offers another example of the surprising directions you can go in after a degree involving languages:
‘I can’t believe it’s been 3 years since my last graduation ceremony at the University of Stirling. After graduating with a BA (Hons) in French and Spanish I decided to return to do a Masters in Translation Studies with TESOL.
After graduating, I decided to take a few months to relax whilst still working in my retail job. However, as those few months ended, COVID was just beginning. As a new graduate, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do next, and it seemed like a daunting few months ahead whilst I looked for a job. I’d always imagined I’d return to Spain or France again to work as a language assistant for another year after graduating, but given the travel restrictions at the time I decided it wasn’t for me. Unfortunately, I was gong to be working in retail for a bit longer than I’d hoped.
I stayed in my retail job for around a year, until a job as a project manager at a translation company popped up. I decided to apply and I was lucky enough to be offered the job. I worked there for around six months, in an incredibly fast-paced (and sometimes very stressful) environment. I certainly learned a lot about how the industry really works and how it compared to what I’d learned during my Masters degree.
After six months, I applied for a job closer to home which is where I am still working today. I work for an online company specialising in plants and garden supplies, and which sells in several different countries in Europe. I am responsible for managing anything which needs translated to be sold in EU countries, as well as doing some general content writing for the website.
Of course, the horticulture industry is definitely not where I expected to be working, but I think it’s proof that languages really can take you anywhere! I’m grateful to have a job that I enjoy and where I still get to use and incorporate languages every day. And I hope it’s an uplifting reminder for anyone recently graduated, or anyone in their final year who may be unsure about the future, there’s a job out there but it may be where you least expect it.’
Many thanks to Nicole for this fantastic post (and for your patience while you waited for us to actually get it up on the blog!) and thank you for the very kind words of encouragement to future Languages graduates.
There seems to be a bit of a theme emerging over this week’s blog posts, something along the lines of the surprising destinations that French at Stirling can lead to. Today’s catch-up with recent graduate, Joanna, who completed her BA Hons in French and Spanish last year, is very much in keeping with the theme…
‘I’m currently writing this from my lunch break- Since graduating and getting married last summer, I have been working in Financial Services, more particularly in the bond market, for TP ICAP here in Belfast. They are a company with a global presence, from Headquarters in London’s Bishopsgate, to New York, to Singapore and more recently they have developed a large presence in France and Spain with offices in Paris and Madrid that are rapidly expanding. Broadly speaking, my role is an analytical one and concentrates around the Settlement of trades and ensuring they are matched in the market in time for settlement date.
I work with banks right across the world and so as you can imagine my languages are very useful! Knowing French has been a hugely significant for me in my job. We work closely with SocGen, Crédit Agricole, La Banque Postale, BNP Paribas, HSBC France. So often, their employees don’t speak a lot of English and so having the ability to make a phone call to these clients in French is so useful and they really appreciate you being able to speak to them in their own language, something that really helps us with promoting and encouraging good customer relations, which is something trading really relies on!
I remember one of the first tasks one of my colleagues asked of me was to call a French client to settle an ongoing issue they were having for weeks that wasn’t resolved because the client couldn’t speak English and none of my colleagues spoke French! I was able to sort it out in a phone call and it really reinforced to me just how important it is to know languages in the workplace.
I really enjoy my job and love how I can continue to use and practise French while working in an environment that allows me to learn and develop new skills in a completely new area of work! There is no doubt that having a languages degree really opened up that opportunity for me and I’m really grateful for all the help I got at Stirling along the way.’
Many thanks to Joanna for this great update, for the pictures (of our lovely campus and from time spent in Southern France) and belated félicitations from French at Stirling! And for any language students reading this whose teachers or tutors keep telling them how many doors languages open… we’re really not making it up!
As Scott’s blog post yesterday showed very clearly, there’s a lot more than ‘just’ French to what we’re up to in French at Stirling so we thought we’d follow-up today with another update that takes us to what might initially seem a rather surprising location, courtesy of our colleague, Nina Parish:
‘I spent the month of February in Lahore, Pakistan, on a research trip with the DisTerrMem project. This project is to do with the management of competing memories over conflicted borders and disputed territories and the military ceremony which takes place every day at the Wagah border (between Pakistan and India) is certainly a case in point and a clear example of antagonistic memory. I spent much of the month grappling with the complex memory work going on around the British colonial past and the traumatic events of Partition in 1947 as represented (or not) in museum exhibitions in Lahore and Islamabad. I also had the pleasure of meeting the director of the Ajoka theatre company, Shahid Nadeem, and watching this company perform and rehearse their work. This research aligns with the work I do in Memory Studies and Museum Studies and may seem a long way from France and the French-speaking world, but questions around language, representation and power resonate everywhere, as can be seen in this interview with the extraordinary poet and translator, Naveed Alam. Meeting and spending time with him in Lahore was one of the highlights of this trip for me.
Can you introduce yourself?
I am Naveed Alam. I live in Lahore, Pakistan. The city has been home for the past 12 years. I was born and raised in Pakistan and left for the US to start my college studies. I returned after spending more than two decades in the US. Considering that I reversed the common trend of east to west migration, I am often asked what brought me back. Frankly, I don’t have a clear or precise answer. There’s certainly a bond with the native soil and language, especially if you are the sole family member living abroad; however, I have always cherished the idea of being rootless or transplantable. I must say my apprenticeship with language(s) has played a great role in determining my personal and professional trajectories. I was immersed in English language and literature (poetry) while in the US—writing, teaching, etc. Then I got here and for the first time (re)connected with Punjabi, a language I had never used for academic or creative writing purposes. It started with translating a 16th century queer poet, Madho Lal Hussein, and led to trying out and appreciating the possibilities of cross-fertilization between the two languages. I published my first collection of bilingual poems in 2020.
Can you present the language situation in Pakistan?
The language situation here is very interesting and quite tragic. For starters, the hundred years of colonialism has a lot to do with it. We aspire to be fluent in English at the expense of our native languages. There are the minority sufferers of the superiority complex (those well versed in English who go to the private, elite educational institutions and often pursue their higher studies abroad) and there are the majority sufferers of the inferiority complex (the population without much access to quality education because of a broken public education system in a country where the powerful military has been setting up the self-serving policies since the independence from the British).
We met for the second time onInternational Mother Tongue Day. Can you tell me about the significance of this day in the Pakistani context?
Well, many people here gloss over the fact that Pakistan has a lot to do with International Mother Language Day. On February 21, 1952 Pakistani forces opened fire on the students of Dhaka University protesting against the imposition of Urdu, as opposed to the native Bengali, as the sole official language in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. Four students were killed. In 1999 UNESCO recognized the day as the celebration of native languages and multilingualism.
What would you have to say about language and memory work in the Pakistani context? If language is the repository of a culture’s memory then what kind of amnesia are we likely to suffer if we lose our language?
If a language is not in good shape and the situation goes unaddressed then it’s likely to produce an unhealthy, often toxic, discourse that further disempowers the vulnerable populations likely to be affected by the biased versions of history, fabricated narratives serving the interests of the hegemonic classes; for example, the official narrative of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in the shape of text books and public media spares no effort to erase or elide the non-Islamic past and sever its link to a pre-independence common South Asian cultural heritage. Reminds me of this line by the Yugoslav-American poet, Charles Simic: ‘The President spoke of war as of a magic love potion.’
They say if we don’t learn from history we are condemned to repeat it. In our Pakistani context with our poor, neglected indigenous languages how can we even access the torn and faded scripts of our history, reach the recesses of our memory, realize our creative and regenerative potential?’
Many, many thanks to Nina for this fantastic blog post and for allowing us to publish this extract from her interview with Naveed Alam. Keep an eye on the blog for more updates in the coming days…
Le blog est de retour! It has been an incredibly busy couple of months for students and staff at Stirling and we are already a few weeks on from the end of our teaching semester so, firstly, well done to all our students for all the hard work over this spring. There’s lots of news for us to share and, although the teaching is over for this academic year, life remains busy for us all but we hope you’ll bear with us as we catch up with overdue blog posts and bring you up to speed with everything that’s been happening and lots of what lies ahead in French at Stirling (and beyond!).
To get the ball rolling once again, it’s fantastic to be able to start with a post from our former student Scott who graduated with a BA Hons in French and Spanish. Scott’s post is particularly timely against the backdrop of the presidential elections that have taken place in Turkey this past week. Confused as to what the connections might be with French at Stirling? Read on…
‘Herkese merhaba! Nearly two years since leaving Stirling and, almost like a rite de passage for French Studies’ students, I was asked (quite a while-ago now) to write a blog piece about my destinations following graduation. I did my undergraduate at Stirling in French and Spanish from 2016 to 2021. Although I was studying French and Spanish, I was always interested in the Middle East and what the Middle East is/was; as the saying goes, Middle of what, East of where?
A country that I was always interested in was Turkey – a good example of the East/West question depending on who you ask. I had been there a few times on holiday and had heard about Orhan Pamuk, but I hadn’t really done much reading into the history of the country or the language and culture. It wasn’t until I was on my British Council year – which should have been used to improve my French rather than being on first-name basis with the bakers in the nearest boulangerie to my flat–, that I began to study Turkish language and culture. Before I knew it, I was dead-set on doing something Turkey-related after finishing my degree at Stirling; it was either further study or finding work in Turkey in some kind of capacity. Luckily for me, Turkish studies was offered as a two-year Master’s degree in the UK; the only issue being, moving from relatively cheap Stirling to incredibly expensive London was quite the shock. Lockdown helped for the first year, I was able to stay at home then I completed a three-month term at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul last summer. Then, I did the London thing; saw the sights, rode the subway, and paid an exorbitant price for oh-so-fashionable city coffee. I’m now back in Scotland getting ready to hand in my end-of-year essays, and preparing for my dissertation.
One of the many things I liked about the studies at Stirling was the breadth of literature we read. I particularly enjoyed Didier Daeninckx’s Cannibale, Hygiène de l’assassin by Amélie Nothomb and Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de suif– which I still return to now and again for how good it is. And, even though I did my French dissertation on film studies, I really enjoyed the close-reading of texts and the ways in which literature had so many different layers of meaning to what you initially read on the page – something you can see very clearly in Boule de suif. It was this interest in literature that I’ve been able to develop in my Master’s through the works of Ottoman writers from the mid-nineteenth-century who, similar to de Maupassant, wrote about the changing world and peoples’ relationships to one another, even though it’s written in a language that no one speaks or writes in anymore – unless you meet a diehard Ottomanist. And, if the stars align, I can take what I’ve been working on mixed with what I learned at Stirling and use it for a PhD programme – hopefully somewhere across the pond.
I initially thought that what I was involved in was far removed from all things French at Stirling but that’s just not the case. After picking up Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Avrupa’da bir Cevelan (A Jaunt in Europe) and Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası (The Carriage Affair) – two authors I’m currently working on, who write pages upon pages of French written in the Ottoman-Arabic script –, I’m back in the deep-end, flicking through French Grammar in Context trying to refresh my memory of French tenses and what subject and object clauses are – something that still plagues me in Turkish. Or if it’s not French grammar I’m reading up on, it’s French literary and cultural theory which, currently, is almost completely incomprehensible to me – but we march on.
Funnily enough, there is quite an interesting history of the use of French language and French culture in Turkish. Just under one-hundred years ago, then president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, using similar policies to those of my favourite Académie, wanted to shake-up the Turkish language by removing many Arabic and Persian loanwords and instead create new Turkic words mixed with Western language. So, in Turkish, if I ever forget the word for suburb, truck, or screen I can just use banliyö, kamyon, and ekran respectively. And apparently, if you squint your eyes a little, the word for school (okul) in Turkish comes from the French école – but no one really knows.’
Many, many thanks to Scott, firstly for his patience as it has taken rather longer than we’d have hoped to get this post online, but primarily just for this excellent article that does so much to show the wide range of avenues that open up to our students after their degrees involving French at Stirling. We look forward to reading more about Scott’s progress over the years ahead and will keep our fingers firmly crossed for the PhD applications!
French at Stirling 
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