Catching up with last year’s graduates

One of the great things about this blog is that it gives us a means of keeping up, not only with what colleagues in French at Stirling are doing, but also with what our students and our graduates are up to. As we get closer and closer to this year’s graduations, we thought it’d be good to catch-up with some of our graduates from last year so, with no further ado…

Shannon studied for a BA Hons in French and Spanish at Stirling and as a 2022 graduate moved on to pursuing her PGDE in primary education: “I am now working full time in a nursery setting in Liverpool as the curriculum practitioner. And my languages have not been completely forgotten. My pre-schoolers enjoy having a Spanish lesson once a week and we may add French to their curriculum soon! Wishing this year’s graduates all the best in the future no matter how you do or what you do!” Sophie also graduated with a BA Hons in French and Spanish and, since graduating, has started another degree studying Theology and Christian Leadership: !I’ve loved using the skills I learnt at Stirling to help this degree and next year I have chosen to study New Testament Greek which makes me excited to be able to use my language skills again.”

Meanwhile David, who graduated with a BA Hons in French and History, spent time in the US after he graduated but has since returned to do an MSc in Heritage at Stirling, and is currently researching and writing his thesis: “You will also be happy to know I have been able to make use of my French skills I acquired at Stirling, in my capacity as a volunteer at the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum. As a guide, not only can I assist French tourists, but behind the scenes I have also been able to translate material into French to help the Museums accreditation and be more welcoming to foreign tourists.” Our other David, who joined us as a mature student, and graduated with a BA Hons in French, explains that “after 7 years of re-education which concluded with four unbelievable years of involvement with French at the University of Stirling, I promised my wife and my three grandchildren that I would devote more time to them which I have done but that has not stopped me for continuing to learn and practice French.” In the year since graduation, David has kept on reading French books (including re-reading some he’d studied with us!), revising French grammar, listening to podcasts and regular news bulletins and trying to speak as much as he can through websites such as Language Exchange: “My appetite for learning has not waivered or reduced in any way. I have always had the will and motivation to continue although, I do miss being a student on campus and the camaraderie of my peers and being able to have the skills of our tutors to hand for advice when required.”

Lara, who completed her BA Hons in French and Spanish last June, has just finished working for a year as an English Language Assistant in a secondary school in Madrid with the British Council: “It’s been a very enriching experience and I plan on returning for a second year.” Ceinwen, having graduated with a BA Hons in French last year, has stayed on at Stirling for postgraduate studies on our MRes Humanities programme carrying on the research she did during her undergraduate degree and “When I’m not doing that I’m making full use of the Institut Français’ cinema programme in Edinburgh.”

Valentina, who graduated with a BA Hons in International Management with European Languages and Society, she has spent the past year working for Global Voices, our local translation and interpreting company, as a credit controller: “I call and email every day in French as I look after the debt for the French and Swiss market, as well as the Italian one. So, naturally my languages skills have improved, I now feel comfortable to speak on the phone to a native speaker which is great! I’ve also learnt all about chorus pro which is the public administration invoicing system in France!” And Muirne, who completed her BA Hons in Business Studies and French last year, has been doing an International Business Master’s here at Stirling this past year and is starting work on her dissertation now: “I’ve really been enjoying this programme and it has opened up lots of different routes I can take to start my career journey. I was also one of the programme reps for the course as I wanted to have a bit more responsibility and show more leadership. I have still been keeping up with my French as I think that will be a useful tool in the future for me. I have also been able to keep in touch with a French pen pal I made in 3rd year which has been helpful for practicing French.”

Sofia, who graduated with a BA Hons in French and Spanish last year, has almost finished her MA in South Asian Area Studies and is currently working on my dissertation, which is focusing on the legacies of trauma stemming from Partition and how this has affected the diasporic descendants of the Partition. Sofia was also recently accepted into a summer programme for Our Shared Cultural Heritage which is a programme that experiments with ways for museums and heritage organisations to work better for young people. Their focus is on the South Asian diaspora in the UK and young people in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh: “I’m not quite sure yet what the programme will entail but it will be interesting to look at heritage, culture, and of course language and to look at the Scottish South Asian community.” Vasiliki, having graduated with a BA Hons in Business Studies and French, moved to Madrid after graduation to do a Master’s in International Trade and Business: “Classes are finishing at the end of July, then I have to submit my thesis by mid-September, so in the meantime I am looking for an internship in the field of marketing or HR mostly, and I am really just looking across Europe, as I don’t want to limit myself. I would also be very much interested in moving back to the UK.”

And Morgan, who graduated with a BA Hons in International Politics and Languages, is currently in Belfast where she has just started writing her Master’s thesis exploring who is responsible for the deaths of displaced persons who drown while attempting to cross the Channel: “While I no longer directly study French, my knowledge of the language and the country have been particularly helpful when conducting research for my thesis. I work part-time as a hotel receptionist where I regularly get to talk with guests from French-speaking countries who always love to be able to chat in their native language.” Brendan, graduated with his BA Hons in French and Spanish last summer, and applied for a Masters in TESOL (Teaching English to Students of Other Languages) here at Stirling Uni and started that at the end of September. He hopes to complete that, including his final teaching portfolio/dissertation project by the end of August at the latest: “Afterwards, in September and October, my programme may offer an external placement in various countries, one of them being France, where I would be asked to observe and do some English teaching in a language school. However, it is not clear if that will materialise yet so right now I’m just taking each day at a time and focusing on what I have to do at present. If everything goes according to plan, I will officially graduate in November. My reasoning for doing this Masters was to prepare me to be able to teach English and get employment more easily when living in France and Spain in the future. If I’m to be completely honest with you all, this has been the most challenging year in my academic journey so far (even more so than third year of undergrad when everything was online due to covid, which says a lot!). However, I’m hopeful that it will bear some fruit in the not-too-distant future in my pursuit to become a languages teacher, which is my dream job.”

Pauline, who graduated with a BA Hons in International Politics and Languages, is just finishing up her Master’s degree in Applied European Governance and Policymaking: “I will have written and oral exams throughout June. I am doing last revisions for my master thesis on the economic impact of integration of migrants in Germany and I expect to graduate at the beginning of July. I am also applying for traineeships and jobs, mainly in Brussels, for EU policy positions, with hopes to not be unemployed in August. We shall see how that goes. I’ve also been involved with a new volunteer network (Generation Climate Europe) and have moved up to now being the Network and Outreach Lead, which I am quite excited about.”

And finally (for the moment… if you’re a 2022 French at Stirling graduate reading this and you haven’t been back in touch yet, there’s still time!) Fiammetta, who graduated in Modern Languages and Business Studies says that her life has completely changed since graduation in June 2022: “After graduating, I was unsure which path to follow for my career. I wasn’t happy with my life and I almost decided to go back to my home country. I started a job in Edinburgh as a customer service assistant in a travel agency. The team was great, however after only 3 months I realised that it wasn’t the job for me so I decided to apply for a job I thought I would never get.

In February I applied for Emirates cabin crew and a few days later I received an email asking me to go to one of the company’s assessment days. Being cabin crew for Emirates has always been on my mind but I always thought it would be really hard for me to get that job. The day after the interview I received the “golden call” and after less than a month I moved to Dubai. I have now been living in Dubai for more than 3 months. It was hard to leave my friends again (I had left my family and friends in my home country 6 years earlier) but it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Now I get to travel and visit so many countries and I get paid for it! I am in contact with so many cultures and during my flights I can use my language skills to interact with customers. The best advice I can give to the graduates of 2023 is to always pursue your dreams, even if it’s not easy or if you have to leave everything behind, it will always be worth it. Now I’m having the best time of my life!”

It’s always lovely to hear from our graduates and to learn where life has taken them after their time as undergraduates at Stirling. Thank you very, very much to all of our 2022 graduates who have been back in touch and who have contributed to this blog post (and to Joanna whose earlier post started off this particular catch-up) and do keep in touch and keep us posted on what you go on to do next. Bon été to you all!

Language, history, memory: research and poetry in Pakistan

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 on International 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…

‘Busy with conference season!’

It’s been great to get a sense of how our students are doing as we shift from term-time into the summer months but we also wanted to let you know what French at Stirling staff are up to, starting with Nina Parish who is, indeed, very busy with conferences at the moment:

‘It was the Society for French Studies annual conference last week and I chaired an excellent panel on ‘Poetic Revolutions: Remediation, innovation and translation of 20th and 21st French Poetics’ with papers by Emma Wagstaff (Birmingham), James Wishart (KCL) and Jeff Barda (Manchester). The conference was cancelled last year so it was really good to see colleagues again albeit virtually and to listen to some fascinating papers and plenaries (our own Fraser McQueen was also live tweeting the conference).

This week, it’s the Memory Studies Association Conference and I’ll be chairing a panel on the ‘Memories from the Margins’ project  and the Journal of the British Academy special issue (‘Memories from The Margins: Violence, Conflict and Counter-Narratives‘) that I co-edited with Daniele Rugo (Brunel) and which came out last week, with papers by Daniele, Carmen Abou Jaoude (Saint Joseph University of Beirut), Adriana Rudling (Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen) and Chris Reynolds (Nottingham Trent University).

I’ll also be chairing a panel on ‘Memory in Music and the Arts’ and speaking with David Clarke (Cardiff) as part of a panel on the Disputed Territories and Memory project about ‘Diaspora Memories and the Virtual Museum: Remembering Lost Homelands.’

And I’ve just finished the second series of Lupin which I found very entertaining indeed!’

Thanks to Nina for this post, good luck with the various papers and chairing duties and there’ll be more updates from students, graduates and staff over the weeks ahead!

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!

From the African grotesque to World War I in Australia: Publication News

It’s always good to end the week with a little round-up email, this time with some updates on the publication front that give a very good indication of the (at times surprising!) range of areas colleagues in French at Stirling work on.

First up, Nina Parish, whose ‘Remembering World War I in Australia: Hyde Park as Site of Memory’, co-written with Chiara O’Reilly, has just been published with Palgrave. The chapter is part of a volume entitled Places of Traumatic Memory: A Global Context, co-edited by Amy Hubbell, Natsuko Akagawa, Sol Rojas-Lizana and Annie Pohlmann. Nina’s work in this chapter was helped by a Visiting Fellowship at the School of Literature, Art and Media at the University of Sydney.

Secondly, the new special issue of the Irish Journal of French Studies (co-edited by Sarah Arens and Joe Ford) on ‘Revisiting the Grotesque in Francophone African Literature’ includes an article by Hannah Grayson entitled ‘Room to Manoeuvre: Moving Beyond the Grotesque in Tierno Monénembo’s Convivial Space.’ In this article, Hannah is moving beyond Achille Mbembé’s grotesque in the dictatorship novels of Tierno Monénembo.

And our new colleague, Julie Hugonny, has an article that is due out very soon in French Forum, that will be entitled “Le Rire au service de la tyrannie dans L’Homme qui Rit, de Victor Hugo.” Congratulations to all!

And in other publication-related news, Aedín ní Loingsigh has been acting in an advisory capacity on the translation into English of our own honorary graduate Lilian Thuram’s My Black Stars: From Lucy to Barack Obama. The book has been translated by Laurent Dubois and edited by our former colleague David Murphy and is due out with Liverpool University Press next year. And finally, Fiona Barclay has just been appointed to serve on the Editorial Board of the journal Modern and Contemporary France.

Good news and busy times all round!