Modern Languages at Aberdeen University

Everyone in Languages at Stirling, and beyond, has been very concerned to read about developments across Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the University of Aberdeen and we wanted to express our solidarity with our colleagues there, across French, Gaelic, German and Spanish.

We have a long history of connections and friendship (academic and otherwise) with Aberdeen and we hope to be able to continue to see those connections and friendships thrive over the coming months and years.

We have co-supervised and continue to co-supervise PhDs together: our former student, Fraser McQueen, currently at the University of Bristol where he is a Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature, was jointly supervised by Fiona Barclay (Stirling) and Nadia Kiwan (Aberdeen). Aedín ní Loingsigh (Stirling) is currently co-supervising a SGSAH-funded student in Translation Studies with Nadia and Nicki Hitchcott (St Andrews). Others of us have taught or, indeed, studied at Aberdeen: Cristina Johnston was a Teaching Fellow in French there in 2004-2006 before joining Stirling, while Pete Baker and Fiona Noble (both now in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Stirling) studied there as undergraduates. Pete’s PhD was supervised by mentors who had taught him at Aberdeen, while Fiona stayed on at Aberdeen to complete her MLitt, PhD and PGDE, as well as working there as a Teaching Fellow. Our (now retired) colleague, Alastair Duncan, also did both his undergraduate degree and his PhD at Aberdeen.

We’ve been involved in external examining at each other’s institutions which has often led to research collaborations between colleagues: Trevor Stack (Aberdeen) was one of our externals in Religion at Stirling for many years, Nina Parish (Stirling) is a current external at Aberdeen. And we’ve been delighted to welcome colleagues from Aberdeen to speak at research events over the years, most recently Ed Welch, who is also Chair of the University Council of Modern Languages (Scotland), with Stirling colleagues, including Nina Parish, Pete Baker and Elizabeth Ezra also having given research papers in Aberdeen.

‘Aberdeen 2040’, the University’s strategic plan (available in Arabic, Gaelic, BSL and Braille, as well as in English), proudly asserts that: ‘Through outreach and the exchange of ideas, we will teach and research across borders. We already rank among the best for our global outlook. We will continue to expand our networks and partnerships, and seek new opportunities for international and intercultural exchange.’ These are fantastic aims for any global University to be working towards and achieving them is dependent on Universities being able to support ambitious, resilient, interculturally literate graduates, equipped with the wide range of skills that will allow them to contribute to local and global communities. These skills are precisely those that are fostered through the study of languages, from Gaelic to German, from French to Spanish, and far, far beyond.

We hope that Aberdeen finds ways to support colleagues across Languages as they work on creative solutions to the extremely challenging circumstances they are facing and we look forward to finding more ways to work with them over the months that lie ahead.

Lilian Thuram’s Latest Book

Congratulations to our honorary graduate Lilian Thuram whose latest book (La Pensée blanche) has just been published in English (White Thinking: Behind the Mask of Racial Identity), translated by Cristina Johnston, Aedín ní Loingsigh and our former colleague, David Murphy. It’s been a great privilege to be involved in the translation and we’re looking forward to seeing the first hard copies of the book very soon!

In the meantime, you can read more about the issues it deals with in David’s article for The Conversation here and in a new interview with Lilian Thuram just published in The Guardian.

Happy National Poetry Day!

Last time we posted anything on the blog, we were celebrating the European Day of Languages and the linguistic diversity of our students and staff. Today is National Poetry Day in the UK which prompted us to think about the ways in which poetry (French-language poetry, in particular) is part of our teaching, research and general areas of interest in French at Stirling. We don’t have specific modules that focus on French poetry and yet it pops up across a range of our courses, from a bit of Baudelaire in Year 1 to Paul Éluard’s ‘Comprenne qui voudra’ in Year 2 as our students examine competing memories in relation to 20^th-century French history, all the way through to Prévert in Elizabeth Ezra’s option on Children’s Literature and the poetry of figures like Georges Brassens in Nina Parish’s option module examining la chanson française.

What has been interesting over the course of the day, as colleagues have exchanged emails between classes and meetings about their thoughts on French and Francophone poetry, has been the extent to which it forms part of our own experiences for so many of us in French at Stirling. Of all of us, Nina Parish’s research has most directly involved poetry, from her own doctoral studies right up to more recent work including, for example, her article on ‘Translating Contemporary French Poetry’ co-written with Emma Wagstaff and their edited collection Writing the Real: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Poetry in French. Nina has also just been invited to join the editorial board for the Cahiers Francis Ponge and, in response to my email this morning asking for people’s thoughts on French poetry, it was to Francis Ponge’s prose poem L’Orange that Nina turned, sending me his description of an orange pip:

‘’Mais à la fin d’une trop courte étude, menée aussi rondement que possible, — il faut en venir au pépin. Ce grain, de la forme d’un minuscule citron, offre à l’extérieur la couleur du bois blanc de citronnier, à l’intérieur un vert de pois ou de germe tendre. C’est en lui que se retrouvent, après l’explosion sensationnelle de la lanterne vénitienne de saveurs, couleurs et parfums que constitue le ballon fruité lui-même, – la dureté relative et la verdeur (non d’ailleurs entièrement insipide) du bois, de la branche, de la feuille: somme toute petite quoique avec certitude la raison d’être du fruit.’

As for me (Cristina Johnston, usually the author of bits of these posts), poetry hasn’t formed part of my own research, as such, but I was involved, many years ago, in collaborative translations into French of the fantastic Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, some of which were published in literary reviews in France. And, in the dim and distant past, I did also teach on the translation of poetry, using some poems in the regional dialect of Ticino (the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland) by Elena Ghielmini and Raymond Queneau’s mind-blowing Cent mille milliards de poèmes with postgraduate students.

For Jean-Michel DesJacques, our Language Coordinator, the reference to National Poetry Day prompted a recollection of his German teacher from school, telling his pupils that they were learning German ‘because it’s a beautiful language’, and a more recent Radio Arte Franco-German broadcast of a poem by Paul Celan that Jean-Michel particularly enjoyed and that you can listen to here. For Fraser McQueen, National Poetry Day means more than just ‘conventional’ poetry but expands to include contemporary French rap music and artists including Kery James, Youssoupha, Médine, Rocé, or Scylla. And for Aedín ní Loingsigh, poetry (French and in other languages, too) has been important as a means of getting through good times and bad over the years. She was particularly reminded, for example, of Christiane Taubira reading ‘Dit de la force de l’amour’ by Éluard at the funeral of Tignous, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Aedín also mentioned that she still remembers coming across Éluard for the first time, while she was at school, thanks to an excellent teacher telling them they could be anything they wanted in a poem and getting the class to read ‘La Terre est bleue’ by way of example.

So many different ways that poetry finds its way into our teaching and our lives and that’s before we mention things like the women’s poetry review Soeurs that came out during lockdown and that is a great way of finding out about what’s happening in contemporary French poetry. Or our former colleague, Lou Sarabadzic’s poetry, some of which we’ve been lucky enough to use in our Bridging Materials, but which was also published earlier this year in a collection entitled Éloge poétique du lubrifiant.

With all of that in mind, then, we hope this prompts you to go off and explore the world of French-language poetry and we wish you a Happy National Poetry Day!

Unexpected local links

A few weeks back, we were following the adventures of our honorary graduate, film director Mark Cousins, whose most recent films were being screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. At some point while he was there, Mark tweeted a photo of a statue of Lord Brougham, an Edinburgh-born statesman who, it turns out, was involved in designing the town of Cannes and died there in 1868. This prompted us to start noticing the unexpected ‘local links’ between France and the various places we are from or where we currently live, and the ways in which they get us thinking about these connections. We’re hoping this might become a regular feature in the blog and to start the ball rolling, Aedín ní Loingsigh has sent us this article, following her recent trip to Ireland:

‘What has a statue of a Cork-born hurler got to do with French at Stirling? Putting it mildly, travel to France and the francophone world has been difficult this summer. As a result, I started to think more about French and France locally. I was lucky to see the Dubuffet exhibition in London and also generally get a sense of the significant impact of French-speaking immigrants on the capital just by encountering young French-speaking staff in restaurants, hearing parents speaking French to bilingual children on the tube, noticing the boulangeries and pâtisseries from the bus. It got me thinking about barely noticeable or unlikely local links in my own life, especially from earlier times growing up in East Cork.

Cue the hurler…

I had a vague recollection from childhood of people talking about the French sculptor who made it. Remembering our advice to students earlier in the summer to begin research with an idea and see where it takes you, I decided to look into it. And so I discovered a history I had known almost nothing about. The sculptor was a certain Yann Goulet and would almost certainly have described himself as an exiled Breton in Ireland rather than French. It turns out he was one of a number of number of Breton nationalists who fled from France at the end of World War II because they were accused of collaborating with the Nazis to further their political aim of separating Brittany from France. Goulet himself was condemned to death ‑ in absentia — in 1947. There are reasons why he and other Bretons found a home in Ireland, of course, and his subsequent activities as an artist show how he continued to express his political views in his new home, including through the statue in this image. In short, there’s a lot more for me to find out about.

Local links are often where we have our first encounter with other cultures and languages. Sometimes we are only vaguely aware of it. If you have any local links with the French-speaking world, try to find out more and let us know about it!’

Thanks to Aedín for the great post and here’s to a random selection of unexpected local links over the coming weeks and months! The more, the merrier.

A little bit of Art Brut…

At the end of the last blog post, our colleague Nina Parish mentioned that she’d been catching up with the series Lupin over the past few weeks. She’s not the only one of us in French at Stirling to be trying to catch up with things French and Francophone beyond the University. For me (Cristina Johnston, usually the person responsible for the bits at the start and end of our blog posts, and sometimes the bits in between), there’s been a little bit of time to catch up with some French and Francophone films I’d missed and there may well be an article on that to follow but, in the meantime, for Aedín ní Loingsigh, first on the agenda was a chance to see an exhibition she’d been very much hoping to get to:

‘Those of you who use the learning resources on the French at Stirling Canvas pages will know that the module image is from a 1961 print by Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) called Nez carotte. Staff in Stirling have long admired his work and his efforts to ensure proper recognition for what he termed Art Brut (art made outside the formal academic contexts of fine art). The Pompidou Centre in Paris has just been given a donation of 900 works of Art Brut. But with trips to be Paris being complicated, to say the least, a recent visit to London meant I was able to visit  the Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty exhibition being held at the Barbican Centre. It didn’t disappoint.

To move through the different rooms displaying 1945 graffiti-inspired lithographs he produced to illustrate the Les Murs poems of Eugène Guillevic, his experimental portraits of literary and artistic personalities in Paris, his paintings of women, his disarming collages made from butterfly wings, his landscapes and the astonishingly original Coucou Bazar and Hourloupe works is to enter an endlessly creative mind. To its credit, the exhibition doesn’t shirk from some of the anti-Semitic statements Dubuffet made in private. In the end, I think the Barbican Exhibition is well worth seeing if you can. Alongside Dubuffet’s own work, a small selection from his Art Brut collection as well as wonderful rarely seen filmed interviews genuinely does justice to his singular view of life and art: ‘L’art doit toujours un peu faire rire et un peu faire peur. Tout sauf ennuyer.’’

And on that excellent note, many thanks to Aedín for this post. The blog will be on a break for the next couple of weeks but will be back at the end of July! In the meantime, bonnes vacances!

Semester Abroad – Killing time? Me too!

This past year has been particularly challenging for our Year 3 students. In most cases, they would ordinarily have spent their Autumn semester preparing for Study Abroad and then their Spring semester away at one of our partner institutions. This year was very different and, while our Study Abroad Advisors (Jean-Michel DesJacques for French and Jose Ferreira-Cayuela for Spanish) did a fantastic job matching students up with our usual partners, the changing conditions over the course of the Spring meant that the shape and form of their online contact with those partners varied quite a bit. The one thing that united all of the students on their Semester Abroad, though, was that they were all also working on independent research projects for us at Stirling throughout the semester. That’s a standard part of our Semester Abroad and the topics this year were as varied as usual, from Simone de Beauvoir to representations of activist movements onscreen and much else in between.

Anyway, we thought it would be good to get some perspectives on this unconventional Semester Abroad from the students who’ve actually been involved and we’re delighted to be able to post the first of these articles by Pauline, who has just completed Year 3 on her International Politics and Languages degree:

‘Studying on the beach on the Côte d’Azur, hanging out with friends and practising my French at the same time, learning more about the French culture and lifestyle first-hand. That‘s how I thought my semester would go. Well, it did not. Due to Covid and ever-changing restrictions in France concerning classes and in-person teaching, I was not able to go to SciencesPo Menton for my semester abroad. However, Menton was not lost. Online classes were still on and allowed me to experience a part of French teaching from afar. This was no real replacement for the adventure on the French Riviera I had hoped for, but it was better than nothing. So, I made the most of it and tried to do my best in classes alongside my French classmates. To be honest, I did not do very well. The topics were complex, assignments were usually based on personal opinions and the way SciencesPo is organised was unbearably chaotic and spontaneous for my strictly-structured ‘German brain.’ My favourite class was my C1 French class, since it was one of the few opportunities I got to practise my French. Although it was on a Wednesday at 7am, I did not miss it once, especially since it was tailored specifically to international students.

One major difference that distinguished Semester 6 from my previous Uni years was the workload. Rather than spending my time organising friends and hobbies around my daily studying, the latter was not very present. There was not much preparation needed for the classes I attended and because I did not have to bring back grades from my classes, the motivation to throw myself into assignments was lacking. So, I threw myself into the assignment that did count, namely the individual research project I had to complete for Stirling.

The work I put into my project could be seen as excessive. I spent most of my time this semester on research for a 2250-word paper. That probably sounds like a bad thing, but it was my way to kill time. It was easy to get into it, too, because I enjoyed learning more about my topic and perfecting phrasing, vocabulary and critical thinking. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about police brutality in France. I study International Politics together with French, so the political touch was a must for me. My supervisor, Aedín ní Loingsigh, recommended different articles and sources I could focus on. Among these was also a film by Ladj Ly called Les Misérables. Sounds familiar? I thought so too. I made the connection to the Victor Hugo novel, searched for police brutality and was guided smoothly to my research question: “La représentation de la police dans Les Misérables de Victor Hugo et dans Les Misérables de Ladj Ly.”

One struggle I encountered right to the end was the length of my project. The effort I put it would have been better placed in a dissertation than a 2250-word project, which resulted in 5000 to 6000 words at one point in the process. I was too enthusiastic. I had read so much, I had too much to say. Cutting down my arguments was probably the hardest part. It hurts when you have remove sentences in French that you’re really proud of because they sound so good and you used such fancy vocabulary. But I did it and I was proud of the work I submitted in the end.

Other than focusing all my academic energy on my project, I spent most of my semester 6 recharging and reenergising, climbing Scottish mountains and going for walks. And as good as that felt, I am more than ready for a semester where the thought of how to kill my time will never cross my mind.

Although my Semester 6 experience was not quite the one I had planned, it is still one I appreciate. The little insight I got into the French education system only inspired me to put studying in a francophone country on my bucket list for the future.’

Many, many thanks to Pauline for starting this series of reflections on Semester Abroad and for this honest account of the semester. We hope you have a great Summer and we look forward to being able to welcome you back to Stirling in the new academic year!

Voilà l’été! Summer updates

As we move towards the summer months – hoping the current good weather in Scotland might continue for a while – the blog is likely to get a little quieter but we’re going to try to keep the articles coming as regularly as we can. If you’re reading this as a French at Stirling student or graduate or colleague, do feel free to get in touch at any stage with ideas for blog posts and we’ll be delighted to receive them.

In the meantime, we’re looking forward to publishing a few more articles by some of this year’s graduating cohort and by some of our students who are about to go into their final year, and work goes on for us all! Our colleague Aedín ní Loingsigh put together a fantastic resource for our continuing students with suggestions of topics they might want to explore over the summer months as a means of keeping in touch with French. There’s nothing ‘formal’ for them to do but Aedín put together a series of topics and themes with ideas for films, books, tv series, podcasts, articles, etc that our students might find helpful in learning more about those themes. Some of the topics overlap with materials on our modules, some students might find the ideas helpful in starting to think about dissertations and other research projects, but, as Aedín explains, it’s just about choosing a topic that’s of interest and seeing where it takes you.

In a similar vein, but this time thinking about future students of languages, Sheena Bell of SCILT (Scotland’s National Centre for Languages) invited Cristina Johnston to make a short video last week, aimed at secondary school pupils who are about to embark on University degrees involving languages. The idea was to give some tips and advice for future languages students about ways to prepare for University over the Summer months and about how to make the most out of their time at University when they get there. We hope the advice is helpful and look forward to welcoming our own incoming Year 1 students in August.

SCILT were also involved in the organisation of a Q&A session last week with our own honorary graduate, French footballer Lilian Thuram. The ‘Conversation with Lilian Thuram’ was jointly organised by SCILT and the University of Strathclyde and it focused primarily on a discussion of Thuram’s book Mes Étoiles noires (My Black Stars)which has just been published in its English translation by Liverpool University Press. The wide-ranging conversation was led by our former colleague, David Murphy, now Head of the School of Humanities at Strathclyde, and his colleague Cédric Moreau. You can read more about Thuram’s anti-racism campaigning and about My Black Stars in this Scotland on Sunday article. And watch this space for news of Stirling’s role in the translation of Thuram’s latest book La Pensée blanche…

More news and updates to follow over the coming weeks!

Conferences, Launch Events and Scholarships

It’s hard to believe that almost three weeks have already gone past since the last French at Stirling blog post. It’s been another busy period for staff and students alike but, as the dust starts to settle a little, this seems like a good time to catch up with some French at Stirling news.

Often, for some of us, the Summer months would mean attending conferences and giving papers. Although that isn’t happening in the real world at the moment, lots of these events have gone online and Julie Hugonny, in particular, will be flying the French at Stirling flag over the coming months. In fact, Julie just gave a paper at the University of Maynooth’s ‘Femmes dérangées, femmes dérangeantes’ conference earlier this month. Her paper (‘Evelyn Habal: Everyday Magic’) examines the character of Evelyn Habal, an actress and prostitute in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future, who is reviled for deceiving men with her artificial beauty and her insincere words. But, as Julie explored in her paper, what this scathing description implicitly recognizes, is her ability to create the perfect woman, every day, with makeup and tulle. Julie will also be giving a paper entitled ‘The Last Man on Earth – A New Myth for a new Trauma’ at the Fates and Graces Mythologium conference in Washington DC and another entitled ‘Mary Shelley’s Last Man. The Delusions of Prophecy’ at the Collapse and Extinction: Art, Literature and Discourse Conference at Stockholm University.

And, back in March (so apologies for not having included it closer to the time) Nina Parish gave a paper on ‘’The UNREST project: War Museums, Memory and Interpretation’, about the Horizon 2020-funded project she worked on before coming to Stirling (www.unrest.eu) at the Modern Languages Research Forum at the University of Aberdeen in March.

At the end of last month, Aedín ní Loingsigh was involved in the launch of the Stirling Centre for Interpreting, Translation and Intercultural Studies (SCITIS),directed by Raquel de Pedro Ricoy. The research centre aims to foster national and international cooperation in the fields of Translation Studies, Interpreting Studies and Intercultural Studies, and to address issues that are relevant to increasingly globalised, diverse societies in ways that have an impact on policy and practice. To celebrate the launch, we were delighted to welcome Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool) to give a short talk followed by a Q&A with audience members. Until recently, Professor Forsdick was AHRC Theme Lead for ‘Translating Cultures’ and oversaw a portfolio of around 120 grants in the fields of translation, interpreting and multilingualism. The exciting launch of SCITIS coincides with a period of unprecedented change in the world. As Professor Forsdick traced how ‘Translating Cultures’ has helped to develop and enrich understandings of global, multilingual transmission and translation in different interconnected contexts, the launch event also gave us an opportunity to explore with him the role and significance of translation and interpreting during the current international health crisis and the move towards a ‘new normal.’ Congratulations and good luck to all our Translation and Interpreting colleagues for the new Centre. You can keep up to date with SCITIS news on Twitter here!

And finally, following on from our RATE nominations last month, more congratulations to Stirling students and staff. Well done to Year 3 English and Film and Media student Oliver whose research project was awarded a Carnegie Vacation Scholarship. Oliver will be working on ‘ 21^st-century Exoticism in Western Cinema’ and Elizabeth Ezra will be supervising the project over the Summer. And congratulations also go to Beth, who is just completing Year 2 of her BA Hons French and Spanish, and who has been awarded a Stevenson Exchange Scholarship to undertake research alongside her British Council Assistantship next year. Beth’s project, which she shaped working with Jean-Michel DesJacques and Cristina Johnston, will look at France’s relationships with its former colonies. She is keen to examine how present-day memory plays into these, the controversies and power imbalances that exist, as well as the ways in which the relationships are represented through museum collections. Thanks to the scholarship Beth plans to travel to Paris, Genoa and Molenbeek in Belgium to gain a holistic understanding of the documentation of immigration from post colonised countries. As she explains: ‘I knew I wanted to find out more about this so I am very grateful to be given this opportunity to build on my current understanding and to have the freedom to travel more than I’d be able to without this grant. I’m excited to study at a university in France too and meet locals my age.’

And last but definitely not least, Elizabeth Ezra’s book Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film, co-edited with Catherine Wheatley, has been nominated for the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for an ‘outstanding or original contribution to the literature of photography or the moving image’.

More exciting French at Stirling news to follow over the weeks ahead!

Student Successes

We’re a week away from the end of teaching and a few hours away from the weekend, and this seems like an excellent time to post congratulations to some of our students.

Félicitations, firstly, to Ewan, Agathe and Shryia who graduated yesterday from our postgraduate Translation programmes, and to their French dissertation supervisor, Aedín ní Loingsigh! Their graduation ceremony was online, with well-deserved congratulatory speeches from our Chair in Translation, Raquel de Pedro Ricoy, as well as our Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Gerry McCormac, and our Chancellor, Jack McConnell. And as our colleague, Liam Bell, in Creative Writing highlighted, there really is something lovely about the hope represented by the work our postgraduate students have carried out from March, and the start of lockdown, and August when they submitted their dissertations.

And a second set of felicitations to final year undergraduate student Christina who studies Modern Languages and Business with us. Christina’s entry to the Institut Français d’Ecosse’s Creative Writing competition, organised in collaboration with Napier University, was awarded the ‘Coup du Coeur du Jury’! You can read her entry (inspired by ‘Ne me quitte pas’ by Jacques Brel and ‘Are you with me’ by Nilu) on the IFE’s website and, as Christina says, ‘I’m thankful for the opportunity, I love creative writing in my spare time and having the chance to write something like this in a different language was a challenge but also new and exciting. I hope everyone who reads it enjoys it and I hope to enjoy the little confidence boost it gave me.’

A brilliant way to end the week and congratulations all round from all in French at Stirling.

Research News: From Bilingualism to Sciamma

As you’ll have gathered from recent blog posts, these are busy weeks for staff and students in French at Stirling and we wanted to just give you a quick update on a couple of staff research events that have also taken place recently.

First up, a couple of weeks ago, Aedín ní Loingsigh jointly presented a paper with her colleague Ingeborg Birnie at the ‘On the border of art and languages teaching in the multilingual world’ conference. Their work examines ‘Dementia, Bilingualism and the Insights of Performance-Based Research’, with a particularly focus on Gaelic-speakers and a theatre workshop that resulted in a play exploring linguistic relationships in a family where the mother’s dementia results in her returning to Gaelic, having formerly spoken English.

And just this morning, Cristina Johnston gave a lecture (via Zoom) at the University of Passau, talking to the students on their International Culture and Business Studies programme about the films of Céline Sciamma. This was a great opportunity to work with students at one of our long-standing partners and we’re particularly grateful to Christian Dölle at Passau for his invitation.

As ever, keep reading the blog for more updates!