Saying goodbye to colleagues

Last Friday members of the French programme met to mark the end of Dr Ashley Harris‘s time at Stirling. Ashley arrived in Stirling in July 2022 to take up a role as Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Fiona Barclay‘s AHRC Follow-on Funding ‘Remembering Empire‘ project. She has previously worked at the University of Surrey, where she was a Teaching Fellow in French Studies, and at Queen’s University Belfast, where she lectured for three years following the completion of her PhD there.

At Belfast Ashley was the recruitment lead for French, including schools outreach and event organisation. That experience stood her in good stead on ‘Remembering Empire’, where the project team created and delivered two new courses to pupils of different ages across seven schools. Ashley also worked with our six wonderful student mentors and, with schools across Stirling and Glasgow, she did plenty of travelling!

As well as working on ‘Remembering Empire’, Ashley supported the French team at Stirling, teaching our first and second year language and culture modules, as well as supervising research projects and examining in oral language assessments. In April we had the chance to hear about her research on the ‘media author’, when she talked about her work on French authors Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq and Frédéric Beigbeder at one of the Division of Literature and Language’s research seminars.

Ashley is leaving us to work on completing a book based on her research. We’re sorry to see her go but can’t wait to read it!

Mid-Semester Catch-Up Time

Regular blog readers will notice that there’s something of a pattern to when posts go up here, with a flurry of articles and news in the build-up to new semesters and then over the first few weeks but then, as work intensifies for everyone, the pace of posts slows a bit. And then suddenly it’s the mid-semester break and there’s a little bit more time for some updates before teaching starts again, and we realise that there are lots of snippets of news to pass on so here goes.

Teaching in French at Stirling has all been online for the first half of this semester and, as was the case last year, we’ve all been impressed and pleased by how well our students have adapted to the online environment. It’s not easy for any of us and, speaking for everyone in the French at Stirling teaching team, we’re really missing being back in the classroom, chatting to students, bumping into people between classes… However, for the time being, everything remains online and will do until the end of teaching in April, at least, and we’re grateful to our students for their patience and enthusiasm.

As well as adapting to our own Stirling teaching online, for our Semester 6 students, there has been a very particular process of adaptation because, under normal circumstances, most of them would have been away on Study Abroad this semester. However, given the current situation, that wasn’t possible. Instead, our Semester 6 students are benefitting from extra conversation sessions organised by our language team, as well as attending online classes at our partner institutions across France, at the Universities of Lorraine, Aix-Marseille and Tours, as well as at ESSEC Business School and Sciences-Po (Paris, Menton and Dijon).

That’s not to say it’s always straightforward for these students. As Nela, a Semester 6 International Management with European Languages and Society student explains: ‘Studying abroad during the pandemic has been a bit challenging, especially in the beginning. I had trouble figuring out the new platform and the work methodology of the Université de Lorraine. What has been extremely useful, though, was setting up a Facebook messenger group with the rest of the people from Stirling that are going through the same process than me. We can support eachother, chat about our new lecturers, and stay more engaged that way!’ A good bit of intercultural understanding to apply but, as ever, our students are rising to the challenge and finding ways to work through the current circumstances.

What else? Well, earlier in the semester, our colleague, Fiona Barclay, gave a fantastic research paper to our Literature and Languages seminar series entitled ‘Instrumentalising ghosts: the case of the French settlers of Algeria’. Fiona’s paper examined the ways in which the pied-noir community in France represents the present-day embodiment of the colonial legacies which continue to haunt the Mediterranean space between the modern nations of France and Algeria. Our PhD student Fraser McQueen’s excellent article ‘Christophe Guilluy’s France Périphérique and the absence of race from Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine’ has just been published in Modern and Contemporary France. Nina Parish just gave a paper with Emma Wagstaff (Birmingham) on ‘Editing Bilingual Poetry Anthologies in 2020’ as part the Extended Conference on ‘Interpreting 21^st-Century Poetry’, organised by La Sapienza University in Rome, the Universitá di Siena, the University of Warwick and the journal Polisemie. And, just before the mid-semester break, Hannah Grayson co-organised a workshop on ‘Languages of Disease in the Contemporary Francophone World’, under the auspices of the IMLR in London, in collaboration with Steven Wilson of Queen’s University Belfast.

And looking ahead to the rest of the semester, what do we have coming up? Nina Parish is organising a translation apéro to mark International Women’s Day on 8^th March, in collaboration with Sandra Daroczi at Bath and involving students from both institutions. Julie Hugonny and our PhD student Lauren Kenny are also organising a series of events that we’ll be hosting over the last three weeks of March around the theme of French Sci-Fi. Events and activities will include a talk on the origins of French sci-fi by Julie, a round-table discussion/Q&A on a French sci-fi film that Elizabeth Ezra will also be part of, and a fun quiz/games session. And Jean-Michel DesJacques and Cristina Johnston have been working with one of our Year 2 French and Spanish students, Beth, who is applying for a Stevenson Exchange Scholarship for next year. On croise les doigts!

More news to come over the weeks ahead (including, I’m delighted to say, updates from students, past and present) but there we go, for starters!

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!

One Year On

This time a year ago, we were welcoming our new colleague, Nina Parish, to French at Stirling. A tremendous amount has happened in the intervening twelve months and Nina has been kind enough to send us her thoughts on her first year working at Stirling:

‘Last week I completed my first year of working in the Division of Literature and Languages at the University of Stirling and what a year it’s been!

The year started with floods and a very washed out graduation ceremony (I still can’t quite believe that it took place – kudos to those who made this happen!) and a considerable amount of damage to the Pathfoot Building where I have my office and do some teaching. The Pathfoot also houses and exhibits the University’s wonderful art collection – what an absolute headache for the curators! But by the start of the semester the vast majority of us had access to our offices and the teaching rooms were ready to be used again!

And so Semester 1 started – earlier than what I was used to in England – and I began to get to know my wonderful colleagues and my new, mostly Scottish, students. I was struck by how pleasant these students are and it made me think a lot about how high tuition fees have changed the student-teacher relationship south of the border. There were also a couple of students from the EU in most of my classes and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed teaching a class with this diversity of experiences. I’m sad that this is likely to change in the future.

Just as I was getting into my stride (and beginning to know my way around the Cottrell Building!), we went on strike. It is always tough to stop teaching in this context and to not have the contact with students that you did previously but it is also important to fight the good fight and there was a lot on the line here from casual contracts to pensions. Looking on the bright side, you also get to know colleagues better on the picket line.

There had been talk about the Covid-19 virus from the beginning of the year but I had managed to ignore it quite successfully and was all set to travel to Warsaw for a research meeting mid-March, to give papers in St Andrews and Aberdeen, to go to a conference in Rome and then travel on to Armenia for a month-long research secondment as part of the EU funded DisTerrMem project in May and June. All this was obviously cancelled and my world shrank to the tremendous city of Edinburgh where I live. Getting to know this city has been the high point of the lockdown and in the last weeks getting out into the glorious Scottish countryside to go walking again has been such a relief. I was appointed Director of Research at the beginning of the year and having the time to be able to talk to my brilliant colleagues about their research trajectories and future plans has been a delight.

I sometimes wonder what my second year at Stirling will bring (I was due to go to Lebanon and Pakistan for the Memories from the Margins and DisTerrMem research projects), but I’ve decided to focus on enjoying the summer and preparing online classes for September for now.

Bilan de l’année: des évènements inattendus (c’est le moins qu’on puisse dire!) mais j’aime vivre et travailler en Ecosse.’

Many, many thanks to Nina for the great post (and for the pictures of Scottish views) and we’re delighted to have you as a colleague at Stirling, and look forward to pestering you for more blog posts in the months and years ahead!

French at Stirling News Round-Up

Another new semester is well underway with lots of French-related news to report…

Welcome, first and foremost, to our new intake of Year 1 students – whether you’re starting from our ‘Advanced’ stream or in our Beginners’ classes, whether you’re here to study French with Human Resource Management or Education, with Spanish or Mathematics, with English or with Business Studies, welcome to Stirling! And a particular welcome to those of you here as part of our double degree partnership in International Management and Intercultural Studies with the University of Passau – we hope you enjoy your year in Scotland!

On the staff front, following the retirement of our former Language Assistant Bernadette Corbett, we’re delighted to welcome Mathilde Mazau to French at Stirling. Mathilde previously worked at the University of Glasgow and will be teaching spoken and written language classes across all years of our undergraduate programmes, working alongside Brigitte Depret.

And welcome back, of course, to our Year 4 students returning from Study Abroad, readjusting to life in Stirling after a semester at Sciences Po in Paris, in Perpignan, Limoges, Clermont-Ferrand or elsewhere, and to Year 3 students coming back after a year on the British Council’s English Language Assistantship scheme! As ever, a new group of Stirling students are about to embark on a year as English Language Assistants as part of the British Council-run scheme so best of luck to them and we look forward to hearing about your year when you come back. We’ve also got around 20 students waiting to find out in the next week where they’ll be spending their Semester Abroad in Spring 2016…

Following on from an extremely interesting workshop organised by our Language Coordinator Jean-Michel DesJacques and led by Petra McLay of SCILT focusing on the transition from Higher French to University French just before the start of semester, we have a whole range of French-related events to look out for over the coming weeks and months.

The Africa in Motion Film Festival – founded by former French at Stirling PhD student, Lizelle Bisschoff – celebrates its 10^th anniversary this year and the packed programme of events (screenings, exhibitions, concerts and much more) can be found here.

As part of the Division of Literature and Languages’ regular research seminar series, we’re particularly looking forward to two papers by colleagues from the University of Aberdeen and the University of Glasgow later in the semester. Ed Welch (Aberdeen) will be giving a talk entitled ‘Image, Imagination and Power: Visualising Urban Futures in Post-war France’ on 25 November and Jackie Clarke (Glasgow) will give a paper entitled ‘Consumer Culture in Post-war France’ on 2 December.

And our own Bill Marshall will be giving a paper on 21 October on ‘The Uses of Prehistory’, developing work he conducted during his recent research leave, a project for which he has also been awarded funding via a British Academy Small Research Grant with a Stirling workshop coming up over the next few months. Bill’s success as one of the joint recipients of the Prix du Québec from the British Association of Canadian Studies will also enable him to go to Montreal in early 2016 to conduct research for an edited book on Quebec Cinema: Texts and Contexts, and on Quebec bande dessinée for an article on images in that medium of the First French Empire.

French Programme Director Cristina Johnston and her Spanish counterpart, Ann Davies, have been successfully awarded Cohort Development Funding by the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities for a series of workshops aimed at Modern Languages PhD students on ‘Writing for an Interdisciplinary Audience’. The workshops will take place at the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Stirling and Glasgow, involving colleagues from all those partner institutions. More details will follow in due course.

Stirling staff remain as active as ever in giving papers and keynotes at various locations throughout the UK and well beyond. David Murphy is giving a seminar on ‘The Performance of Pan-Africanism’ at the University of Edinburgh in November 2015 and Bill Marshall will be delivering a keynote lecture at the World Cinema and Television in French conference at the University of Cincinnati in September 2016. Bill will also be giving the annual Christianson Lecture at University of Bristol in March 2016. Elizabeth Ezra will be introducing and leading a discussion with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet at St Andrews University in October 2015 and has been invited to give a talk in November at the University of Aberdeen on her forthcoming book, The Cinema of Things. And Jean-Michel DesJacques continues to represent Stirling at regular UCMLS meetings throughout the year.

Following the successful EIAE Conference in Glasgow earlier this month, we’re also continuing to look at our range of Study Abroad partner institutions with a view to expanding our network. In this context, we were delighted to welcome colleagues from the Ecole de Management de Strasbourg to our campus, as well as colleagues from our partners ESSEC at Cergy and the Ecole de Gouvernance et d’Economie in Rabat and we’re looking forward to welcoming Annie Birks (Université Catholique de l’Ouest) in October to give a paper to our Translation students.

We’re also really looking forward to finding out more about our students’ French Society events for the coming year and will be posting more about them over the weeks and months ahead. And there’ll be plenty of events organised for French students coming up too, including a get-together for future and returning Study Abroad students from Stirling as well as visiting French and Francophone exchange students, and an employability event organised by Frances Sessford from Publishing Studies with a range of participants talking about what to do with a degree in Languages.

And last but not least, on the teaching front, we’ve got option modules running this year in French Crime Fiction, Quebec Cinema, The French Atlantic Slave Trade and the Cinema of the Fantastic and, for the first time, we’re offering an option module in Translation Theory at Honours level. French at Stirling staff will also be contributing teaching to a range of Stirling TPG courses including Translation Studies, Translation with TESOL, Gender Studies and our Film Studies programme.

Lots more news and updates to follow!

Seminars and Conferences

Very much looking forward to our colleague Fiona Barclay‘s Literature and Languages research seminar this afternoon on ‘Remembering Algeria: melancholy, depression and the colonizing of the pieds-noirs.’ Fiona is just back from the American Comparative Literature Association‘s annual conference in Seattle where she gave a paper entitled ‘Unsettled culture: the Algerian afterlives of the children of the pieds-noirs in The Last Life (Messud, 1999)’ as part of a seminar on ‘Cultures of Settlement and Unsettlement.’

And in a few weeks, Aedín ní Loingsigh will be giving a paper entitled ‘Mis/trusting Narratives of Undocumented Migrancy’ as part of the ninth annual Liverpool Travel Seminar (Mobilities and Place) at Liverpool John Moores University, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and Liverpool Hope University.

Tom Conley on the American Western as a French Invention

Very much looking forward to this afternoon’s Literature and Languages Research Seminar by the inaugural Society for French Studies Visiting International Fellow Tom Conley entitled ‘The American Western: A French Invention.’ The paper hypothesizes that much of the heritage of the Western genre and what, both aesthetically and politically, we can “do with” the Western today, cues on the taxonomy of already fifty years ago that is today of critical purchase.

Tom Conley is Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media.  His most recent books include Cartographic Cinema (2007);  An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2011) and À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (2014).

Research Seminar on Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema

Great research seminar coming up this week as we kick off the second half of our Spring semester. Guy Austin (Newcastle University) will be giving a paper as part of the regular Literature and Languages series entitled ‘Trauma in Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema: Telling Stories of Civil Conflict’, examining the representation in recent Algerian documentary cinema of trauma generated by the so-called civil war or “black decade” that Algeria experienced in the 1990s. Taking as case studies the films Algérie la vie quand même (Sahraoui, 1998), Aliénations (Bensmaïl 2004) and Lettre à ma soeur (Djahnine, 2008), the analysis will address the means whereby the themes of loss, depression and trauma are represented.

More French and Francophone seminars in the weeks ahead.

Literature and Languages Research Seminar Series

More good news, looking ahead to the semester that’s about to begin, in the shape of a lively and diverse range of research seminars organised within the Division of Literature and Languages, organised by our colleague Angus Vine.

The full programme follows below – all welcome!

Wednesday 12 February

Professor Mary Ellis Gibson (University of Glasgow)

‘The “Indian Mutiny” in Sonnets: A Scottish Missionary’s Daughter Caught Between Sorrow and Vengeance’

Wednesday 26 February

Dr Sarah Parker (University of Stirling, Impact Fellow)

‘Publicity, Celebrity, Fashion: Photographing Edna St. Vincent Millay’

 Wednesday 5 March

Dr Alex Davis (University of St Andrews)

‘Leaving Behind, Staying On: Fictional Testaments from Chaucer to Shakespeare’

Wednesday 19 March

Dr Dale Townshend (University of Stirling)

‘Romancing the Bastille: Architecture and the Gothic Imagination, 1715-1800’

Wednesday 2 April

Dr Cristina Johnston (University of Stirling)

‘Tehran, Vienna, Paris: The Cultural Geographies of Persepolis’

Wednesday 16 April

Dr Bob Irvine (University of Edinburgh)

‘A Night at the Theatre with Robert Burns: Dumfries and the rhetoric of “Reform”’

Wednesday 23 April

Dr Suzanne Gilbert (University of Stirling)

‘Hogg’s Journeys and the Highlands in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals’

Wednesday 30 April

Presentations on Research – Final-Year PhD Students

All seminars take place in Pathfoot, E26, 15:30-17:00. Drinks are served afterwards. For further information please contact Angus Vine (angus.vine@stir.ac.uk).