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!
This is an exceptional opportunity for a strong PhD student to make an important contribution to knowledge about Scotland’s evolving languages landscape and we warmly encourage applications from candidates with a grounding in areas related to languages and education.
The award is available on a full-time basis for a period of 3 years and 6 months, from 1st October 2023 until 31st March 2027. It includes an annual stipend of £18,622, plus a CDA allowance of £600 towards travel costs to the partner organisation. The successful applicant may also apply for additional funding directly from SGSAH to attend conferences and undertake additional skills development.
If this sounds like you, please see the advert for full details. And get your applications in quickly – the deadline is 5 June 2023!
Another week, another blog post, and this time one which, courtesy of our colleague Hannah Grayson, will take us across the Atlantic to the buzz of academic conferences:
“Back in March I attended the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Niagara Falls (New York state). This is a huge conference that brings together lots of scholars and postgraduate students working across languages and literatures. The theme this year was ‘resilience’, which is central to my research on writing in the aftermath of crisis. I presented a paper on two novels that look at civil war in Côte d’Ivoire: Quand on refuse on dit non (Ahmadou Kourouma, 2005) and Matins de couvre-feu (Tanella Boni, 2005). In these novels, characters cope with the insecurity and surveillance that comes with civil war by navigating rural and urban landscapes through networks of solidarity. I argued that this moves away from the kind of autonomy that can often be assumed when people are asked to be ‘resilient’. That is to say, rather than writing characters who are self-sufficient, consistently strong, and hardy, Kourouma and Boni’s characters demonstrate a conscious débrouillardise (or wily expertise) in drawing on the relationships they have with others. This paper is going to be published as a chapter in an edited volume on critical perspectives on humanities and resilience next year.
Beyond the excellent conference papers, a highlight for me was meeting other scholars who are working on similar themes. Some of these people will be speaking at a research workshop I’m organising in Stirling in September, but more on that another time. Here are the waterfalls!
A few weeks ago I flew back across the Atlantic for a conference at the Université de Montréal. This was based on the work of Tierno Monénembo, a Guinean author who I have been researching for a very long time. So I was particularly excited to spend two days discussing all kinds of things in his novels: presentations covered community in his novels, how he interacts with Guinea’s history, the circulation of objects, the particular use of bars as discursive sites, and the use of music in his Cuban novel. I presented on two novels: Bled and Saharienne Indigo. In both of these novels, a girl protagonist is on the run, and has to work out ways of escaping (by stealing cars, hitching a ride in a poultry van, riding on a donkey). My paper discussed the recurring trope of the wheel in these novels, and how we can use it to understand the cyclical nature of violence experienced by the women Monénembo writes about. The paper was taken from the final chapter of a book I’m working on this summer called Nomads’ Land, all about characters on the move in Monénembo’s fiction. Also hopefully being published next year!
Montréal was full of pleasant surprises. The biggest one of all was meeting the former president of Guinea who came to part of our conference and, it turns out, is a close friend of Monénembo! Also great street art!”
Many thanks to Hannah for the blog post and the pictures, and we look forward to seeing Nomads’ Land in print next year!
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 onInternational 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…
Le blog est de retour! It has been an incredibly busy couple of months for students and staff at Stirling and we are already a few weeks on from the end of our teaching semester so, firstly, well done to all our students for all the hard work over this spring. There’s lots of news for us to share and, although the teaching is over for this academic year, life remains busy for us all but we hope you’ll bear with us as we catch up with overdue blog posts and bring you up to speed with everything that’s been happening and lots of what lies ahead in French at Stirling (and beyond!).
To get the ball rolling once again, it’s fantastic to be able to start with a post from our former student Scott who graduated with a BA Hons in French and Spanish. Scott’s post is particularly timely against the backdrop of the presidential elections that have taken place in Turkey this past week. Confused as to what the connections might be with French at Stirling? Read on…
‘Herkese merhaba! Nearly two years since leaving Stirling and, almost like a rite de passage for French Studies’ students, I was asked (quite a while-ago now) to write a blog piece about my destinations following graduation. I did my undergraduate at Stirling in French and Spanish from 2016 to 2021. Although I was studying French and Spanish, I was always interested in the Middle East and what the Middle East is/was; as the saying goes, Middle of what, East of where?
A country that I was always interested in was Turkey – a good example of the East/West question depending on who you ask. I had been there a few times on holiday and had heard about Orhan Pamuk, but I hadn’t really done much reading into the history of the country or the language and culture. It wasn’t until I was on my British Council year – which should have been used to improve my French rather than being on first-name basis with the bakers in the nearest boulangerie to my flat–, that I began to study Turkish language and culture. Before I knew it, I was dead-set on doing something Turkey-related after finishing my degree at Stirling; it was either further study or finding work in Turkey in some kind of capacity. Luckily for me, Turkish studies was offered as a two-year Master’s degree in the UK; the only issue being, moving from relatively cheap Stirling to incredibly expensive London was quite the shock. Lockdown helped for the first year, I was able to stay at home then I completed a three-month term at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul last summer. Then, I did the London thing; saw the sights, rode the subway, and paid an exorbitant price for oh-so-fashionable city coffee. I’m now back in Scotland getting ready to hand in my end-of-year essays, and preparing for my dissertation.
One of the many things I liked about the studies at Stirling was the breadth of literature we read. I particularly enjoyed Didier Daeninckx’s Cannibale, Hygiène de l’assassin by Amélie Nothomb and Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de suif– which I still return to now and again for how good it is. And, even though I did my French dissertation on film studies, I really enjoyed the close-reading of texts and the ways in which literature had so many different layers of meaning to what you initially read on the page – something you can see very clearly in Boule de suif. It was this interest in literature that I’ve been able to develop in my Master’s through the works of Ottoman writers from the mid-nineteenth-century who, similar to de Maupassant, wrote about the changing world and peoples’ relationships to one another, even though it’s written in a language that no one speaks or writes in anymore – unless you meet a diehard Ottomanist. And, if the stars align, I can take what I’ve been working on mixed with what I learned at Stirling and use it for a PhD programme – hopefully somewhere across the pond.
I initially thought that what I was involved in was far removed from all things French at Stirling but that’s just not the case. After picking up Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Avrupa’da bir Cevelan (A Jaunt in Europe) and Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası (The Carriage Affair) – two authors I’m currently working on, who write pages upon pages of French written in the Ottoman-Arabic script –, I’m back in the deep-end, flicking through French Grammar in Context trying to refresh my memory of French tenses and what subject and object clauses are – something that still plagues me in Turkish. Or if it’s not French grammar I’m reading up on, it’s French literary and cultural theory which, currently, is almost completely incomprehensible to me – but we march on.
Funnily enough, there is quite an interesting history of the use of French language and French culture in Turkish. Just under one-hundred years ago, then president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, using similar policies to those of my favourite Académie, wanted to shake-up the Turkish language by removing many Arabic and Persian loanwords and instead create new Turkic words mixed with Western language. So, in Turkish, if I ever forget the word for suburb, truck, or screen I can just use banliyö, kamyon, and ekran respectively. And apparently, if you squint your eyes a little, the word for school (okul) in Turkish comes from the French école – but no one really knows.’
Many, many thanks to Scott, firstly for his patience as it has taken rather longer than we’d have hoped to get this post online, but primarily just for this excellent article that does so much to show the wide range of avenues that open up to our students after their degrees involving French at Stirling. We look forward to reading more about Scott’s progress over the years ahead and will keep our fingers firmly crossed for the PhD applications!
Over these summer months, we’re keeping busy in French at Stirling, whether thinking about teaching for the new academic year, working on publications, attending conferences, developing schools outreach projects or just generally keeping up with all things French and Francophone. Having recently spent a month on a research trip in Armenia (blog post to follow later in the summer…), our colleague Nina Parish has just returned from another trip and has sent this update on the research she’s been conducting and the encounters and discoveries she has made along the way:
‘The month I have just spent at the Borderland Foundation, staying at the site of the Milosz Manor in Krasnogruda situated close to the Polish-Lithuanian border in the Suwalki Gap, has certainly been rich in discoveries and acquiring knowledge.
I have had a crash course in learning about the history of this particular borderland, which is so relevant to the work we are doing for the DisTerrMem project, but also in understanding the Borderland philosophy and practice developed in Sejny and Krasnogruda by Krzysztof Czyźewski and his friends and family.
I have twice been to see The Sejny Chronicles, an ongoing theatre workshop and play, organised by the Borderland Foundation and performed by local teenagers, aimed at rediscovering the rich multicultural, multilingual (hi)stories of Sejny using oral histories handed down by its residents before World War II. I have had the immense privilege of talking to different generations involved in The Sejny Chronicles and been struck by what a lasting influence participating in this project has had on their lives. I have swayed to the intoxicating music created by the Klezmer Orchestra of the Sejny Theatre in the White Synagogue.
I have been reminded of the importance of the local, of community practice, of kindness, and of the slow work of poetry.’
Many, many thanks to Nina for this post and do follow the links above to learn more about the Borderland Foundation and the DisTerrMem project.
There has been lots going on across French at Stirling these past few months, as you’ll have gathered from recent posts. Before the blog goes quiet for a couple of weeks of annual leave, we wanted to just bring you up-to-speed with a couple of pieces of news…
Congratulations to Fiona Barclay who was awarded £100K AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement for a project called ‘Remembering Empire’ that aims to reach new audiences with the findings of the earlier project on ‘Narratives and Representations of the French Settlers of Algeria.’ The project will run for 12 months from 1 July and we’ll be posting more about it once it’s fully up and running.
And last week, Cristina Johnston delivered a training session on Feedback and Assessment in Higher Education for doctoral students. The session was part of a series of workshops on Learning and Teaching that is jointly organised by Pallavi Joshi and Jordan McCullough on behalf of the British and Irish subject associations for French Studies, ASMCF and ADEFFI.
More to follow soon, not least by way of a catch-up on Nina Parish’s recent research trips to Armenia and Poland… Busy times all round!
Following on from the updates from our fantastic finalists, a few more updates but from colleagues this time, starting with Fraser McQueen who has been working with us as a Lecturer in French this past year:
“I’ve been fortunate enough to see a couple of things I’ve been working on for a while come to fruition over the past couple of weeks. Firstly, I’ve now signed a book contract with Liverpool University Press for my first monograph, which will be entitled Towards a Community of Friendship? Contemporary French Islamophobia in Literature and Film. The book will be based on my PhD thesis, which I also wrote at Stirling. I’d been working on the proposal since January (shortly after graduating in December), so it’s nice to have signed the contract, even if it’s only now that the real work of actually converting the thesis into a book starts!
Equally excitingly, after applying in April, I’ve been granted a ten-month postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, which will start in August. My project will be entitled ‘Colonial Continuities in the Literature of the French Far Right’. It will read novels written by writers associated with the French far right during the colonial period alongside others by writers associated with the contemporary far right. Its main aim will be to explore what this comparative perspective can tell us about how colonial discourses continue to structure a modern-day far-right imaginary that has increasingly penetrated the mainstream in France and beyond. Following the unprecedented gains made by the Rassemblement national in France’s recent legislative elections, the project could hardly be more timely. Two areas of particular interest will be the relationship between Islamophobia and antisemitism and discourses around gender.
I’m excited to get started on both projects and very grateful to the colleagues at Stirling who helped me with both applications. After submitting the final version of my thesis in September, I spent last year as a lecturer in French at Stirling, and will be sad to leave behind both those colleagues and the students I’ve got to know over the past year. I’m sure that I’ll stay in touch, though, and it’s great to know that I can get back to working on new research!”
Many thanks to Fraser for sending through this blog post and, firstly, thank you for having been a such an excellent colleague and, secondly, congratulations both on the book contract and the post-doc. We look forward to hearing more about both in in due course and do keep in touch!
It has been an intensely busy semester at Stirling which has been great, in many ways, but does also mean that our blog has been rather inactive for far too long. There’s lots of news to pass on so that’s all about to change over the coming days and weeks and, to start things off, an update from our colleague Hannah Grayson who has been conducting research in the US for the past few months:
“I currently have the privilege to be working at the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, in Washington DC. I’m here researching the history of transatlantic journeys between sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil for a book I’m writing on Tierno Monénembo’s fiction. But a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit St Mary’s College Maryland with a friend and colleague whose research overlaps with mine, and to sit in on three of his classes. Dr George McLeod works on how contemporary Francophone African authors and filmmakers respond to collective and individual stories of violence.
I visited the beautiful campus of St Mary’s, which is at the end of a peninsula just 90 minutes outside of DC. It’s a relatively small liberal arts college with about 2,000 students, and similar to Stirling in some ways (very strong Arts and Humanities departments; gallery on campus; sport plays a big part in the university; it’s on the water). What made a nice change was it being warm enough to have class outside in the sun!
Students were interested to ask me about the experience of teaching in Scotland, and how our approaches and courses might differ from theirs. What I found most interesting was sitting in on a 3rd and 4th year class debate about the French presidential election that had just been held. I asked the students about their perspectives and how they’ve been shaped by what’s recently taken place in US politics. They had lots of interesting comments about the role of media discourse, and the importance of critical perspectives when reading French language news sources they might be less familiar with.
Not far from the campus is this recently installed memorial to the local history of enslavement. The college commissioned this piece to stand on a former plantation, and artists Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee collaborated with poet Quenton Baker to form the commemorative space.
From the information on site: ‘Rows of erasure poetry are cut from mirrored surfaces, creating an oscillation between legibility and illegibility. We experience the loss or un-speakability within fragmented historical narratives of slavery. The words of archival documents, from St Mary’s County, of historical runaway slave advertisements are “redacted” by clapboards to reveal an emergent narrative of enslaved people. The reflective nature of the walls suggests that even as viewers of the present day, we are not to penetrate the sacred private space of the enslaved people who were once present at the site.’
Monday was a federal holiday here for Juneteenth, offering yet another interesting occasion to think about Atlantic pasts and how we engage with them today.”
Many, many thanks to Hannah for the great post and pictures – enjoy the remainder of your trip! And to all blog readers: more updates to follow very soon…
2022 marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the Algerian War, arguably the moment that defined the end of France’s imperial ambitions when the state withdrew its forces after almost 8 years of war, and almost a million settlers of European origin fled Algeria for France. It also happens to coincide with the Presidential elections, which take place in two rounds in April. Traditionally, the leading candidates have felt the need to reach out to prospective voters by pronouncing on various aspects of France’s colonial history, and this year is no exception.
On Wednesday 26 January, Emmanuel Macron gave a speech in which he acknowledged a massacre that took place on 26 March 1962 in the rue d’Isly in Algiers, in which 46 French civilians were shot dead by soldiers of the French army, and around 200 were injured. It’s an event that has become emblematic for the settler community, who regard it as a decisive moment that demonstrated that the settlers could no longer be safe in Algeria. As such, many credit it with precipitating the mass exodus to France. Despite the number of casualties, the families of the victims feel that the massacre has never had the kind of official recognition that they sought: they see it as analogous to Bloody Sunday, the infamous shootings that took place ten years later in Derry, and demand a public enquiry similar to that which led to the Saville Report. Macron’s speech, in which he said that the massacre was ‘unforgivable’ for the French Republic and called for a reconciliation with the repatriated settlers, or pieds-noirs, goes some way to acknowledging the long-held hurts but is unlikely to satisfy everyone.
Our colleague, Fiona Barclay, who is a specialist working on representations of the French settlers of Algeria, and who recently published an article on the rue d’Isly massacre, was interviewed on France 24about Macron’s speech. You can find more of France 24’s coverage of President Macron’s hugely significant speech here.
French at Stirling 
You must be logged in to post a comment.