Mid-Semester Catch-Up

This afternoon marks the start of our week-long mid-semester break at Stirling and, as ever, it feels as though the first half of the semester has just raced past. It has been different, of course, from previous years but lots has still been happening and we wanted to give you a quick update on all things ‘French at Stirling’:

Firstly, we’re delighted to see a few of our students entering a French-language creative writing competition run by our colleagues at Napier University and we want to wish best of luck to the entrants!

This first half of semester has also seen a wealth of activity on the research seminar front, with French at Stirling staff giving talks at Stirling and elsewhere, and colleagues from other Universities giving papers in our (online) research seminar series. This started with Cristina Johnston giving a paper on the films of Céline Sciamma at the first Literature and Languages research seminar of the new academic year (alongside a great paper by our colleague in English Studies, Kelsey Jackson Williams). Next up was Nina Parish who gave a paper entitled ‘Remembering homeland and representing diaspora in virtual museums (or how to conduct fieldwork during lockdown)’ at Stirling University’s Centre for Environment and Heritage Policy.

Nina also spoke, this semester, at an event organised by the Centre for Poetic Innovation at the University of St Andrews, alongside her colleague Emma Wagstaff from the University of Birmingham, where they spoke about ‘Editing Bilingual Poetry Anthologies in the 21^st Century’. This talk had been scheduled twice in the last academic year but both times were cancelled because of strikes and then the pandemic but, as Nina says, ‘this time we managed. What’s more, Emma was able to join us which was wonderful because we have collaborated on research to do with poetic practice in French for many years. Together, we edited a bilingual anthology of contemporary French poetry, which appeared with Enitharmon Press in 2016.

During our paper, we talked about some aspects of the decision-making process involved in compiling this anthology and gave a brief flavour of the texts it includes. We argued that an anthology of translated texts can affect how they are viewed in the original ‘source’ culture as well as introducing them to a new literary system. We discussed our plans for a further digital anthology that would enable us to anthologise some examples of the wide range of forms taken by contemporary poetic practice in French, but which also poses translation challenges of its own.’

The St Andrews connection continued, coincidentally, with a research paper given by Victoria Turner who is Lecturer in French at St Andrews and who works on medieval French and Occitan literature. The brilliant paper Victoria gave as part of our L&L seminar series was entitled ‘Everywhere and Nowhere: (T)racing Mixed-Race Relationships in Medieval French Epic.’

What else has been happening? Well, Hannah Grayson has just learned that a research project she is part of (Resilience+: Integrating Equity into Climate-Resilient Development) has been awarded GCRF and ESRC funding so congratulations there! The project will look at conceptualisations of resilience and develop a network to support inclusive and responsive programming and policy making in Rwanda. It particularly focuses on marginalised groups affected by flooding in rural Rwanda and Hannah’s contribution will be around language and inter-cultural understanding, building on her previous work in Rwanda.

We’ve also delighted to announce that our former PhD student, Jamal Bahmad, has co-authored a fantastic volume entitled Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices, Transnational Perspectives, with Will Higbee and Florence Martin. And that our colleague Elizabeth Ezra’s Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film, co-edited with Catherine Wheatley, will be out in a couple of months. Both are published by Edinburgh University Press.

And, last but not least for the moment, we’re looking forward to welcoming Julie Hugonny, who will be joined us as Lecturer in French for the rest of this year after the mid-semester break, and we’d like to say thanks to Olivier Gillot who has been working as a French Teaching Assistant with us over the first half of this semester.

There is doubtless much more that could be added and more details on some of the above will come over the weeks ahead but, in the meantime, for Stirling colleagues and students reading this, we hope you have a good mid-semester break, and for anybody else reading, we hope this finds you well. À bientôt!

Exhibitions, Grants, Talks… French at Stirling Staff Updates

The past couple of blog posts have focused on French at Stirling students’ achievements and activities – now it’s time for an update on what staff have been up to and what’s coming up for us over the weeks and months ahead…

Congratulations, firstly, to Fiona Barclay who has just learned that she has been awarded a prestigious AHRC Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellow award which she will hold for 23 months from July 2018 onwards. The award will enable Fiona to work on a major project entitled ‘From colonisers to refugees: narratives and representations of the French settlers of Algeria.’

Back in December, David Murphy was invited to serve on the fiction jury at the 8th Algiers International Film Festival: ‘an intense but fascinating week, watching lots of films and meeting filmmakers, actors and other creative artists from all over the world. There was even time for a visit to the famous Casbah, which will be familiar to students from La Bataille d’Alger. Our special jury prize went to a wonderful Algerian film En attendant les hirondelles by a young Algerian director, Karim Moussaoui. You should be able to catch it in Scotland later this year.’

David is also the main organiser for the Scottish tour of the exhibition ‘Putting People on Display’, a pared-down version of a major exhibition (‘Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage’) organised by the French colonial history research group, ACHAC, which was held at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris in 2011/12. Three additional posters focusing on the Scottish context have been specially commissioned for this Scottish tour and a longer blog post will follow…

At the end of last year, Cristina Johnston was involved in organising the Stirling-based component of ATLAS’s week-long translation workshops. The workshop brought together a group of translators working between French and English, giving them an opportunity to focus on the translation of a range of articles and chapters under the ‘Translating History’ umbrella and under the expert guidance of Stirling’s Emerita Professor Siân Reynolds (translator, among many other things, of the crime fiction of Fred Vargas) and experienced translator Diane Meur. Workshop participants were also given the opportunity to talk to students on our postgraduate Translation Studies programmes and to visit Stirling’s own Pathfoot Press, courtesy of Kelsey Jackson Williams.

The dossier on ‘Cinema and Childhood’ Cristina coordinated with contributions from a group of Stirling undergraduates (past and present) was also published towards the end of last year in Intellect’s journal of undergraduate film scholarship Film Matters. The dossier contains articles on representations of ‘Orphan Annie’ by Hayley J.  Burrell, a comparison of La Vita è bella and The Boy in the Stripded Pyjamas by Floriana Guerra, an examination of children and the destruction of innocence in WWII films by Laura Jones, analysis of ‘children as the uncanny’ in The White Ribbon from Regina Mosch, Ralitsa Shentova’s exploration of girlhood, fairytales and reality through Atonement and Crows, Lewis Urquhart’s essay on ‘concealed childhoods’ in Caché and Conor Syme’s reflections on childhood faith in science fiction. A fantastic set of articles by some impressive future film scholars!

Elizabeth Ezra’s book The Cinema of Things was published by Bloomsbury in early November last year, and her updated chapter on ‘The Cinemising Process: Film-Going in the Silent Era’ is in the 2nd edition of The French Cinema Book just out from the BFI. And, as Elizabeth launches her new option module on Children’s Literature, we’re particularly pleased to be able to sing the praises of her children’s novel Ruby McCracken: Tragic without Magic which was named by The Herald as ‘One of the Nine Best Books for Children and Teenagers’ in its Christmas 2017 round-up. The novel also won the 2016 Kelpies Award for New Scottish Writing for Children.

Bill Marshall – whose ‘Cinéma-Monde’ conference will take place in Stirling at the end of May – was recently invited to the University of Vienna where he gave a talk entitled ‘Quebec Cinema as Global Cinema?’ and, later this month, he will be at UNISA (South Africa) where he will deliver a keynote on ‘Deleuze, Guattari, Hocquenghem: Anti-Oedipal Texts and Minor Cinemas’ as part of their February Lectures on ‘Queer Life in the Global South.’

And our Language Team (Jean-Michel DesJacques, Mathilde Mazau and Brigitte Depret) continue their hard work updating our language programmes, including our new format of oral and aural teaching for final year students which enables them to benefit from weekly 15-minute paired sessions, as well as more standard classroom-based conversation practice.

More to follow on much of the above as the blog continues its revival!