French at Stirling: Confidence, Communication, Travel

We’re all getting ready to welcome our new students who’ll be joining us in just a few weeks, and to welcome back continuing students, but that also means saying goodbye to those who’ve just graduated and who are off to other things and other climes. It’s a busy time for them all but we’re delighted to be able to post this article by Emily, who just graduated in French and History and who has taken the time to reflect on her five years with us, before heading off to start a postgrad course in a couple of weeks:

‘It feels a wee bit strange writing this post for the French at Stirling blog, as it’s the last one I’ll write as a student at Stirling before I start a Masters at a different university. Honestly, I can’t quite believe it, it seems like last week that we were all lined up outside Pathfoot A96 for our first introductory lecture. I certainly don’t think that any of us then could have predicted how our studies would end up finishing this year with the pandemic!

Now that I’ve got the degree, I think I can admit that Stirling wasn’t initially my first choice, but in the end, it was definitely the right one. I remember coming to an open day way back in 2016 with my dad and loving the uni and its location straight away, and this only grew when I started my studies. First and second year seemed to go by in a flash, and although I maybe spent too much time going out and not enough studying, I wouldn’t change any of it for the world. During these first two years away from home, I met some of the best people who have gone on to become some of my closest friends, which I think is just as important as good grades, if not more.

That being said, after reaching the halfway mark, I decided that it would be a good idea to take a year out to work in France as an English Language Assistant to improve my French, but more importantly, to eat my body weight in cheese and croissants. I was placed in lycée in a wee village in Brittany, and even though I’m not planning on going into full-time teaching, this role taught me loads, and it really was one of the best things I’ve done in my life so far.

However, it wouldn’t be entirely honest if I painted it as all sunshine and roses. Moving to a completely new country, having to speak another language and adapt to new cultures and customs can be really hard at times, and I know I had my fair share of ups and downs along the way. Despite the difficulties however, I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending it to any current French students who get the opportunity, because you get so much more out of it than just improving your French skills. I won’t use that gap-year cliché and say that I ‘found myself’ during my year abroad, but I feel that I did quite a bit of growing up while I was away, and that I came back a more independent and understanding person. Even if you learn nothing else while away, meeting new people that you wouldn’t have met otherwise and learning to understand their perspectives is always going to be worth it.

Taking a year out really helped my French skills, but after it I was really looking forward to getting back into uni. I think that a lot of people, myself included, feel the pressure being turned up in third year with results counting towards our final degree, but now when I look back on 2019, especially with everything that’s happened in the last year, I can’t help but see it as some sort of golden age when we could actually sit together in classrooms without social distancing, when in reality it was still quite difficult! In third year we also had the opportunity to participate in an Erasmus exchange, and so I spent that spring semester at the Université de Limoges in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. It was nice to experience French education as a student instead of a teacher, and although it was cut short because of the pandemic, it was still a really fun experience.

And so, that brings me onto my final year at Stirling. I think everyone had their highs and lows during this year: not having to commute and being able to wear PJs to class was nice, but not seeing any classmates or lecturers and being stuck inside for a whole year? Not so good. Despite all of our classes and lectures being online, the staff in the language department did a really good job at trying to make the year as normal as they could for us. Hopefully we’ll eventually get an in-person graduation ceremony so we can actually see each other in real life instead of through a screen, and celebrate the fact that we made it through the toughest year of uni – during a global pandemic no less.

Over the last 5 years, the question I’ve probably been asked the most in regards to my degree is ‘what are you going to do with that?’, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s heard this. Still, I never get tired of explaining to people that actually there are so many options with a language degree, and you get a lot more from it than just a second language. It teaches you how to be confident, how to communicate effectively, and it also teaches you that making mistakes is okay!

So, what am I going to do with it? Well, the next step for me will be in September, when I’m due to start a master’s degree in publishing at Edinburgh Napier. I’ve decided to go down this route because I feel that I’ll be able to put a lot of the skills that I’ve learned through my degree into use in a career in publishing, potentially in international rights or marketing. But before all that, I’ll be working over the summer as an optical consultant and a French and History tutor!

Before I finish, I would like to take the time to thank all of the amazing lecturers that have taught and helped me over the last 5 years: Cristina Johnston, Elizabeth Ezra, Mathilde Mazau, Brigitte Depret, Jean-Michel DesJacques, Fiona Barclay, Bill Marshall, David Murphy, Fanny Lacôte, and everyone else in the Language Department who I’ve come across whether it be in an exam or just in the corridor! THANK YOU!’

Many, many thanks to Emily for such a great article and for the kind words, and we all wish you all the best for the postgrad course this coming year and for life beyond that. Keep in touch and best wishes!

From Morocco to Scotland and Back

Following on from Maja’s ‘postcard’ from life as a Stirling undergraduate, we’re really pleased to be able to post an article by our former PhD student, Jamal Bahmad who is now Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Mohammed V University in Morocco:

‘I will always remember the time I landed at Edinburgh airport one chilly night in early October 2010. It was a direct flight from Marrakech. You can imagine the shock I went through that night not only due to the radically different weather, but also the quietness of Edinburgh compared to the riotous Moroccan cities.

My wonder turned into long-lasting wonderment when I took the train to Stirling the following morning. Arriving in a new city where I knew no one was enough to make every step and moment an adventure for me. British culture was not foreign to me as a long-time BBC listener and graduate of the English Department in Morocco, but the broadcast and bookish Britain was different from everyday Stirling one decade into the twenty-first century. I thought I had prepared myself for that by watching some recent Scottish films, but my Scotland was more Braveheart than Trainspotting. That wasn’t to change much over the course of the three and a half years I spent as PhD student at Stirling University. This was in part due to the Scottish trait to encourage fantastic images of Scotland, and another part due to my own reluctance to engage much with everyday life in the city. I didn’t go back to Morocco to see my family for almost three years. I spent most of the time in my room working on my doctoral thesis on Moroccan cinema. No wonder I submitted it on time, and the piece went on to win the British Association for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize 2015 for Best PhD Dissertation.

Yes, I didn’t travel to the Highlands. So what? Our campus, as the university’s marketing team kept repeating, was literally at the foot of the fabled Highlands. Almost every window at the university buildings gives on a fable-like vista. Scotland is a beautiful country. I say that even though I mostly read about it while I was in Scotland! Imagined Scotland is more powerful than the touristic experience.

The wet and cold weather of Scotland is one thing, and the warmth of Scottish people in general and the cosmopolitan academic and admin staff at the modern languages division at the university was something else. My supervisor David Murphy was the best thesis advisor I could have wished for. A brilliant mind and industrious person, David wasn’t short of warmth and hospitality. He and his partner Aedin occasionally invited me to their flat in Glasgow, a city I discovered halfway into my Scottish stay. It was markedly different from Edinburgh or Stirling and felt more real than both. Bill Marshall was a huge presence in the department and the School of Languages. His humility and cosmopolitan character made him a great help to me. Antonio Sanchez in the Spanish department was a great person and interlocutor, always willing to give of his time to students even if for just a chat in the corridor. We felt immediately close perhaps because of our shared Moorish heritage and character.

Time passed quickly and I soon graduated with a PhD. I wasn’t exactly happy because I had to think about the future, something I had been sheltered from by the Horizon Studentship-funded time to work on my thesis in the warmth of my room in postgraduate student accommodation in Lyon Crescent, Bridge of Allan. A job wasn’t long in arriving. Almost without applying, I soon started working as a postdoctoral research fellow at Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany. Obviously, people saw in me something I didn’t see in myself. Living in Germany didn’t appeal to me from day one, so I was overjoyed when I heard from the British Academy one week into my first postdoctoral job. I was one of the lucky few to get awarded one of the prestigious British Academy postdoctoral fellowships. I stayed in Germany till late December 2014. I started on my BA fellowship at the University of Leeds in January of the following year. It was an exciting time. I even began seriously thinking about settling in the country to pursue an academic career.

I was in the middle of fieldwork in Algeria in May 2015 when I heard that my dear father in Morocco was sick. He was diagnosed with a malicious kind of melanoma. I was devastated by the news and was soon back in Morocco to be next to him. Family is primordial in my Amazigh culture, and my father was very close to me even though or perhaps because our relationship consisted mainly of him telling stories of his life and me listening avidly. The listening project intensified during his illness. It made me reconsider my transnational life. I frequently travelled back to Morocco to see him and ultimately decided to plan for an academic career in Morocco even though my father had a terminal illness. He passed away on 27 March 2016. Less than three months later, I landed a job as an assistant professor at Mohammed V University in Rabat. I’m now here and have survived the pandemic unharmed so far (those hermetic days in Lyon Crescent didn’t go to waste; they immunised me against loneliness and boredom!), but Stirling and the memories of my time there are forever on my mind. It’s a beautiful and unceasing friendship. How I long to revisit that beautiful campus and relive some of those memories!

Rabat, 26 September 2020′

Many, many thanks to Jamal for this fantastic postcard from Morocco (and from Stirling) and we look forward to hearing more from you over the years ahead, and send you all our best wishes from Scotland.

Summer 2019 Publications and Conferences

As we move closer and closer to the start of term, there’ll be more updates and news about all things French and Francophone at Stirling. In the meantime, we just wanted to let you know about a few new publications and conference papers written by some of our current and former postgrads and colleagues.

Former French at Stirling PhD student Martin Verbeke’s latest article ‘Unveiling the Myth of Mars and Venus in French rap: An analysis of the gender determinants of non-standard language use’ was just published in the August 2019 issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies.

And our current PhD student Fraser McQueen gave a paper at the Society for French Studies annual conference at Royal Holloway in July entitled ‘Muslim is French: Zahwa Djennad’s Tabou. Confession d’un jeune de banlieue (2013).’ Fraser will be conferencing again later this week, at the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France in Paris, where he’ll be speaking about ‘Transnational Paris and Peripheral France in Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine.’

And finally, for the moment, our former colleague, Bill Marshall, has a chapter on Xavier Dolan’s films out in ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan, a new collection focusing on Dolan, edited by Andrée Lafontaine. The chapter was previously published in Nottingham French Studies. Bill’s chapter on ‘Quebec Cinema as Global Cinema’ was also published earlier this year in Janine Marchessault and Will Straw’s Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema.

More to follow…

News from a former PhD student

Many of the articles on this blog over the past months and years have given an overview of what our undergraduate students go on to do after graduation and we’re hoping to continue that particular stream of posts in the weeks ahead. For just now, though, a slightly different perspective, in the shape of this article from Martin who completed his PhD with us, under the supervision of Bill Marshall and Cristina Johnston, a few years ago now, working on language and French and Francophone rap:

‘Since the end of my PhD in June 2016, I have focused primarily on teaching and publishing my PhD research. Although my main area of study was French at university, I started working full-time as a Dutch and English teacher in a Belgian secondary school in September 2016 because of the shortage of such teachers. My Bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting combined with my time spent in Flanders (for my Master’s degree) and Scotland made me a very sought-after candidate for such vacancies.

Of course, I would have preferred to teach French right away, ideally in a high school or a university (both types of higher education in Belgium), but there are many French teachers on the job market. Even with a PhD, it is hard to stand out when applying for a vacancy. This was made even more complicated by the introduction of a new law regulating the degrees needed to teach in secondary schools. Since September 2016, it has become mandatory to possess a teaching degree from a university (called agrégation). Without this degree, it is hard to find a teaching position, you get paid less, anyone with a teaching degree, even fresh out of university, will be prioritised over you regardless of your years of service, and it is impossible (actually illegal) to get a permanent contract.

As I had been made aware of this upcoming legislative change, I enrolled in a French teaching degree at the Université catholique de Louvain in September 2016, right after my PhD. This course normally takes one year to complete, but I took it over two years while working full-time. It is only worth 30 credits on paper but takes a lot of time and effort and represents many more credits in practice. In fact, if you take it within a Master’s degree, you are allowed to take a 6-credit ‘empty course’ as compensation because they do realise that it would be too hard otherwise. Unfortunately, they do not offer such a privilege to people who only follow the teaching part of the degree. Things were made even more difficult by my father’s passing away in October 2016. Despite all of this, I somehow managed to finish the degree with the highest distinction (18/20 average) while having a second daughter and publishing 5 articles based on chapters from my thesis. My hair was thinning before and now I am completely bald… Go figure!

This new degree has created opportunities for me. It allowed me to start working part-time as a French teacher in a secondary school last September while continuing to teach English to ‘immersion’ classes (with students who have certain courses in English despite being in a French-speaking school). Next school year, I am very likely to work as a French teacher full-time. My goal is to do this for a few years and to eventually find a more fulfilling position in a Belgian high school or maybe university if I get the right opportunity. A big reform is about to take place with regards to teaching degrees, which means that high schools and universities will be looking for new teachers. The director of the French teaching degree at the Université catholique de Louvain told me that he will get in touch with me then, as I impressed him during my studies. I’ve had interviews with other high school directors who told me that my profile would be very interesting then. I do enjoy teaching in secondary schools, but students can be unruly and the school programs uninspiring at times. Furthermore, it does not make long-term sense, in my opinion, as my PhD is not valued at all (nor even taken into consideration).

In any case, we will see what the future has in store for me! I will make sure to let the University of Stirling know. In the meantime, you can read some of my publications on non-standard vocabulary in Francophone rap if you want to: in French here, and in English here, here, here and here!’

Many, many thanks to Martin for having found the time among so many other commitments to write this blog post for us and we look forward to hearing how things work out in the next academic year, and send you our best wishes!

Staff news: conferences and new colleagues

Many of our recent blog posts have centred on the fantastic achievements and activities of our students (past and present) but it occurs to us that it’s a while since we’ve posted an update on what French at Stirling staff are up to so here goes…

Firstly, as regular blog followers will know, we’ve made some new appointments in French at Stirling over the past few months. That has meant saying goodbye to valued colleagues (Bill Marshall at the end of August last year, David Murphy at the end of December) but it has also meant welcoming and getting to know new colleagues. Beatrice Ivey has settled well into her Research Assistantship, working with Fiona Barclay on the AHRC-funded project ‘Narratives and Representations of the French Settlers of Algeria’ (if you haven’t seen it yet, their exhibition is still on in Pathfoot); Emeline Morin is already a semester into her 2-year post with us and doing a brilliant job; Aedín ní Loingsigh joined us halfway through the Autumn semester on a permanent lectureship across French and Translation and is also doing brilliantly; and Hannah Grayson has now also joined us – as of 1 January – on a permanent lectureship and is, of course, settling in really well. Lots of changes – all for the good!

Secondly, many of us will be popping up at a range of conferences and invited talks over the months ahead, starting with Hannah Grayson who will be co-convening a seminar stream on responding to violence in postcolonial African literature at the American Comparative Literature Association at Georgetown University in March. Hannah will then be presenting on Véronique Tadjo (an author whose work she teaches on as part of our Cultures of Travel modules this semester) at the 20^th and 21^st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium in Oklahoma City. And, when she’s back in the UK, on 3 April, Hannah will be speaking at an evening of remembrance in St Andrews, to commemorate 25 years since the genocide in Rwanda.

Cristina Johnston will be giving a paper on the 20^th anniversary of the PaCS legislation at the annual Society for French Studies conference at Royal Holloway in early July, and then a paper on the representation (or lack thereof) of lesbian characters in contemporary French cinema at the MLA International Symposium in Lisbon at the end of July.

Elizabeth Ezra will be giving an invited talk at the University of Tours at the start of April at a conference called ‘On the Ruins and Margins of European Identity in Cinema.’ Her talk is titled ‘Out of Bounds: The Spatial Politics of Civility in The Square (Östlund, 2017) and Happy End (Haneke, 2017).’ Elizabeth also has an article on ethics and social relations coming out in May in the journal Children’s Literature called ‘Becoming Familiar: Witches and Companion Animals in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials.’

Elizabeth also travelled to France in December to examine the PhD thesis of Literature and Language’s PhD student Fanny Lacôte, who has taught on various modules in French at Stirling. The viva was a public event, which attracted a significant audience composed of friends, family, and members of the public and Fanny passed with flying colours so many congratulations to her!

And, finally for the moment, following on from Aedín ní Loingsigh’s successful Erasmus+ teaching exchange at Limoges late last year, we’re currently finalising arrangements to welcome our colleague Joëlle Popineau from our partners at the University of Tours who will spend a week on an Erasmus+ staff mobility with us in early March. We’re very much looking forward to welcoming Joëlle to Stirling in a few weeks.

More to follow shortly, I’ve no doubt!

New Semester: Welcome Back!

First day of teaching for the Spring semester and French at Stirling is back!

So, welcome back, firstly, to the over- 250 students registered across our various French modules, from Year 1 Advanced and Beginners’ streams all the way through to final year Core Language and dissertations. And to those of you reading this as French at Stirling students embarking on your integral Semester Abroad or entering the second half of your year as an English Language Assistant, we hope you have a great time and look forward to tales of your studies, work  and travels as the semester progresses.

On the staffing front, following Bill Marshall’s retirement at the end of last Summer, we were sorry to say goodbye to our colleague David Murphy who left to take up a new role at the University of Strathclyde at the start of January. We wish him all the very best in the new job. As regular blog readers will know, we’ve made a series of great new appointments to French at Stirling and we’re delighted that Hannah Grayson has now joined us as a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, working alongside Aedín ní Loingsigh and Emeline Morin who both started last semester, and the rest of the French at Stirling team.

As ever, there’ll be plenty of blog posts over the days and weeks ahead with details of what our students and staff have been up to over the past few months and plans for the months ahead so watch this space but, in the meantime, welcome back to the new semester and welcome back to French at Stirling!

New publication by Bill Marshall

Although he retired a couple of months ago, we’re delighted to see that our former colleague Bill Marshall is keeping himself busy with a new piece about works by Copi (entitled ‘Ne pas s’asseoir’) that forms part of French sociologist and historian Antoine Idier’s ground-breaking work on 130 years of LGBT+ history in France. More about the project here and here!

New Semester

It’s already the end of our first week of the new semester here at Stirling so time for a quick round-up of our news. It’s been a busy little run up to the start of teaching here: new colleagues, great First Year numbers and those starting in our Advanced stream have been benefiting from our Bridging Materials, French at Stirling has been rated No.3 in Scotland and in the top 20 in the UK by the 2019 Complete University Guide… A period of great change and excitement!

Where to start? ‘New colleagues’ seems a good place. Beatrice Ivey, Research Assistant on Fiona Barclay’s AHRC Leadership project, is now in Stirling and settling into Divisional life. She and Fiona are working on the organisation of the exhibition that forms part of the project, more on which soon. We’ve also welcomed Emeline Morin who has joined us as a Lecturer in French for the next two years. Emeline’s research interests lie in comparative literature and fairytales and she’s teaching with us across a wide range of courses.

Alongside Emeline, two other new lecturers will be joining us over the months ahead. Aedín ní Loingsigh will be starting in October, with Hannah Grayson taking up her post in January. Hannah’s recent work has been on the Rwandan Stories of Change project at St Andrews. Much as we were sad to see Bill Marshall retire, it’s great to get a chance to welcome a fantastic group of new colleagues and we’re looking forward to working with them. We’ve also got some new faces among the Teaching Assistants who work as part of our Language team (with Language Coordinator, Jean-Michel DesJacques, Mathilde Mazau and Brigitte Depret): Fanny Lacôte and Fraser McQueen who have taught with us before are joined by Aurélie Noël who has previously taught at the University of Glasgow.

As ever, the start of the new semester also means welcoming back our students. Our finalists are back from their Semester Abroad (in France, Quebec, Morocco, Switzerland… or Hispanophone destinations for those doing French and Spanish) and our Year 3 students are about to start the process to select their destination for their Semester Abroad. With that in mind, Jean-Michel DesJacques, Jose Ferreira-Cayuela and Cristina Johnston are organising their annual get-together at the end of September that gives all those students a chance to meet over wine and nibbles to talk about Study Abroad and to exchange questions and tips. All the University’s incoming exchange students from French or Spanish-speaking partner institutions are also invited and it’s a great chance for the different groups of students to get to know each other.

Some of those incoming French-language exchange students are also currently being recruited to lead informal conversation sessions for students in a range of year groups, to offer a further opportunity for spoken language practice beyond the weekly tuition offered by our Language team.

And, of course, we have a great cohort of Year 2 students, many of whom will be applying for English Language Assistantships over the course of this year (welcome back to those who were ELAs last year!). For the first half of our second year, we run an Intermediate class for those who started as complete beginners with us in Year 1 and it’s great to see that numbers on that module are even higher than last year.

Finalists back from Semester Abroad, Year 3 students planning time abroad, students settling into Year 2 and good numbers of Year 1 students which is fantastic to see. Those on the Advanced stream – taking French with a wide range of other subjects – have been working their way through the Bridging Materials that we put together for incoming students each year, to help smooth the transition from secondary school language study to University-level language learning. And those on our Beginners’ stream are about to plunge into the intensive programme of language learning that will introduce them to French and build their confidence and ability as the weeks progress.

A great group of undergraduates and an enthusiastic intake of students on the French stream of our Translation and Translation with TESOL programmes who will work under the guidance of French at Stirling staff on their translation portfolios and, ultimately, on their dissertation projects. It’s been particularly nice to see some familiar faces on those programmes with recent graduates returning to undertake postgrad work with us (as well as across other TPG programmes at Stirling, of course).

As in previous years, we’ll be posting profiles of our students regularly, partly to catch up with those who’ve written for us before and to get a sense of how their studies are progressing, and partly to introduce you to some of our new Year 1 intake, so keep an eye on these pages!

As for French at Stirling colleagues, lots of news to report there, too. Fiona Barclay, Beatrice Ivey and Cristina Johnston are in discussions with the MacRobert’s film programmer, Grahame Reid, to finalise a programme of French Film Festival screenings that will take place at the MacRobert later in the semester. Details to follow but expect some great new French-language films! (It’s not directly French-related but do also check out Grahame’s Central Scotland Documentary Festival at the MacRobert from 4-8 October – a fantastic programme of documentaries lies ahead!) And on another film-related note, David Murphy will be involved with the Africa in Motion festival in November – more on which soon…

 

 

 

 

Aedín ní Loingsigh will be participating in a workpshop on Interdisciplinarity at the Université de Limoges in December and Elizabeth Ezra gave a paper in June at the Contemporary Childhood Conference at the University of Strathclyde examining the witch-familiar relationships in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. Elizabeth has also just signed a contract for a book, co-edited with Catherine Wheatley of KCL entitled Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film, which will be published by EUP in 2020. And with her non-academic hat on, Elizabeth will be talking about her children’s book Ruby McCracken at the Wigtown Book Festival later this month.

This weekend, while staff and students from French and Spanish are talking to prospective students at Stirling University’s Open Day (15 September – come and see us!), Jean-Michel DesJacques is off to Dundee where he’ll be taking part in the 25th Anniversary Conference UCML Scotland​: Looking inward and outward. Jean-Michel will be meeting actors from all education sectors from Primary to higher education. The 1+2 language initiative will be high on the agenda but not exclusively since challenges and issues in languages are multiple and complex.

And our Phd student Fraser McQueen has been presenting his work across a range of conferences since the Spring, including the ASMCF Postgraduate Study Day at the IMLR (where he spoke about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in France), the Society for French Studies Postgraduate Study day at UCL (with a paper on female radicalisation fiction), Stirling’s own annual Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Research Conference and the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Postgraduate Study Day at Birmingham. Fraser also co-organised the SGSAH Second Year PG Symposium in Glasgow in June and presented his own work there, too.

There is much, much more that we could include here but that seems a good taste of what’s going on to start things off this semester. More to follow over the weeks ahead! In the meantime, many thanks to the students whose photos from last semester abroad have made their way into this post and bon weekend!

Research at Stirling: Exhibitions, Conferences and Interactive Maps

A Summer of changes for French at Stirling, not only with new cohorts of students coming to join us and our ELAs and Study Abroad students returning, but also on the staffing front. As we’ve mentioned here before, Bill Marshall retires at the end of next month and we are currently advertising for two new lecturers so there’ll be new faces in the teaching team over the months ahead. And, as we’ve also spoken about on the blog, Fiona Barclay – who has been on research leave this past semester – was awarded an AHRC Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellowship so we’re also appointing a fixed-term lecturer to replace Fiona for the next two years. We’re looking forward to introducing you to these yet-to-be-appointed colleagues very soon but, first, we thought it’d be good to get Fiona to tell us a bit about what she’s been up to over these past few months and what lies ahead. And that also gives us an excellent excuse to introduce Dr Beatrice Ivey who was recently appointed to work as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant with Fiona and who we’re very excited to welcome to Stirling!

‘Greetings from the sunny south of France, where I’ve just finished my semester of research leave! Stirling seems very far away but as the semester comes to a close it’s a good time to look back on the last few months and reflect on plans, progress, and the inevitable changes that happen…

I came to France in January with the plan of writing a couple of chapters of the book that I’m working on, using local libraries, and accessing some archives. The book is on the European settlers who came to Algeria following its conquest by the French in 1830. Almost all of them – 900,000 – were forced to leave for France when Algeria became independent in 1962 in one of the biggest population movements since 1945. Since then, a proportion of them have been very vocal in French politics, whilst others have produced a large corpus of literature which records their memories of their homeland and works through their feelings of loss and nostalgia. My project looks at these narratives and representations, and the ways in which the community’s identity is being passed on to the younger generations born in France since 1962.

Plans are often subject to change, and so it was on this occasion. My idea of using the local university library ran into trouble straightaway, when I discovered that, due to a combination of a local strike against university mergers, and the subsequent national blockade of universities, it was closed until further notice. In the end ‘until further notice’ meant nearly 5 months, giving me a new perspective on the UK’s UCU strike action, and a lot of sympathy for local students who were still expected to sit exams. Thankfully Stirling’s electronic library holdings and lending provision has developed a lot in the last few years, so I was able to access most of the texts needed.

Le Voyageur

The second change to my plans came in February, when I received news that my application to the AHRC’s Leadership Fellows scheme had been successful. The award is £250,000 for a two-year project starting next month and, in addition to the completion of the book, it has a substantial set of public engagement activities, some of which will start early in the project. Consequently, I’ve spent much of the last few months working with colleagues in museums and archives in Paris, Perpignan and Port-Vendres to organise access to images, video testimonies, artefacts and so on. These will feature in a year-long exhibition opening in September at the Pathfoot Gallery in Stirling. I’m also working with colleagues at Stirling to build a new project website, which will feature an interactive map giving access to many of the images, videos and sound-files, as well as links to a free access online course (MOOC) and film season taking place as part of the UK French Film Festival in November 2018.

The project will also have another team member, a Postdoctoral Research Assistant who will work on the project for 15 months. I’m delighted that Dr Beatrice Ivey, who recently completed her PhD at the University of Leeds, will be starting at Stirling on 1 September. She will be leading on many of the digital and online parts of the project, and also co-organising an international conference on forced migration which will take place at Stirling next May. We look forward to welcoming her to Stirling!’

Many thanks to Fiona for this update – news of the exhibition and other events will follow in due course! – and over to Beatrice:

‘I’m joining the ‘From Colonisers to Refugees’ project at the University of Stirling as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and, in this role, I’ll be assisting Dr Fiona Barclay with the management of the project website, the organisation of an international conference at Stirling in 2019, research and publication as part of a planned special issue. I will also interview people who have settled in Scotland having fled Syria as refugees for the project’s Digital Cartographies and Storytelling Soundscapes components.

I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds in 2018, examining the gender performativity of cultural memory in writings by Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, Ahmed Kalouaz, Malika Mokeddem, and Nina Bouraoui. My thesis, entitled ‘Performing Gender, Performing the Past’ argued that acts of cultural memory also reiterate, and possibly subvert, the gendered imaginaries associated with French colonialism in Algeria. I examined specific cases of gendered memory which produced connections between the memory of French Algeria and other disparate histories of extreme violence, such as the Holocaust, Partition, Slavery in the Caribbean, and the ongoing ‘Border Crisis’ (Daniel Trilling 2017) in the Mediterranean. I have published a chapter ‘Hélène Cixous’s L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves: Gendering Memories of Colonialism in Algeria and India’ in the volume French Feminisms 1975 and After (Atack, Fell, Holmes, Long 2018) and an article ‘Affect, Gender, and Postmemory in Nina Bouraoui’s Representations of the 1970s’ in the International Journal of Francophone Studies. 

My current research focuses on the transnational memory of forced migration in Francophone cultural production from and about the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean.’

Many thanks to Beatrice and Fiona for these posts, and good luck with the project!

Québec, Guyane and beyond: Active Retirement…

And finally, as promised, in this little flurry, something more research-centred with news of publications, conferences and talks from our colleague Bill Marshall who’ll be retiring at the end of August.

Chloé Leriche

Bill’s Cinéma-monde conference at Stirling in May was a great success. As well as including papers covering everything from Franco-Romanian cinema to the films of Rachid Bouchareb via discussions of the subtitling of banlieue cinema and the role of remakes, the two-day conference also featured two film screenings. Chloé Leriche’s 2016 work Avant les rues was screened as the conference opener and Bashir Bensaddek’s Montréal la blanche (also from 2016) brought the conference to a close. Both directors were in Stirling for discussions around their films.

 

And as if all that wasn’t enough, the middle evening of the conference also included a celebration for the launch of two great new books: Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt’s edited collection Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald’s There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema.

And as well as organising that particular conference, Bill has also given a lecture entitled ‘Canadian Cinema: Between the National and the Global’ as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s ‘Focus on Canada’ strand and his chapter ‘Equality and Difference: Queering Guyane?’ is just out in Locating Guyane, edited by Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod.

It’s going to be very strange to start our new academic year without Bill but we’re hoping he’ll continue to keep us posted on his plans and projects (and travels…) over the months and years ahead! And, of course, we wish him a very, very happy retirement!