Bill Marshall Awarded Inaugural SFS Prize Research Fellowship

Street Sign in Tautavel

 

Congratulations to French at Stirling’s Bill Marshall who has been awarded the inaugural Society for French Studies Prize Research Fellowship. This award will enable Bill to develop his work on ‘The Uses of Prehistory in Modern and Contemporary France.’ Through its engagement with other fields, the project will demonstrate the pivotal role that French culture – including the unique place of prehistory in that culture and its geography – plays in launching, re-launching and elaborating far-reaching and fundamental debates concerning ‘what is ‘human’?’

This award follows on from Bill’s success in winning the SFS‘s inaugural Visiting International Fellowship last year which enabled him to bring leading American academic Professor Tom Conley to the UK for a series of talks on topics relating to cartography and translation.

Caverne du Pont d’Arc

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).

French ‘Feel-Bad’ Cinema

Great seminar yesterday, in the weekly (more or less!) Literature and Languages series, given by Nikolaj Lübecker of St John’s College Oxford on ‘The Feel-Bad Comedy: Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin (2014).’ Nikolaj’s book on feel-bad cinema will be out with Edinburgh University Press later this year and includes analysis of key films by directors including Dumont, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke and Gus Van Sant. You can hear a talk by Nikolaj on this subject here.

More French and Francophone-themed talks coming up in the series over coming weeks from Guy Austin (on Algerian documentary cinema), Tom Conley (in Stirling as the inaugural Society for French Studies Visiting Fellow) and our own Fiona Barclay (on melancholy, depression and the colonizing of the pieds-noirs) and current PhD student Mauro di Lullo (on Blanchot).

Professor Tom Conley to give guest lectures at Stirling

Cartographic Cinema by Tom Conley

Tom Conley, Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, will be visiting Stirling in Spring 2015 as the Inaugural Visiting Fellow of the Society for French Studies. He will first give the annual Malcolm Bowie Lecture at the IMLR in London before giving a guest SFS lecture at the University Stirling where he will also lead a postgraduate workshop.

Professor Conley’s work engages with literary and visual culture from the early modern to the contemporary period and his many publications include Cartographic Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). His workshops during the Fellowship will focus in particular on cartography and translation.

More details of dates and venues for his Prof. Conley’s lectures and workshops closer to the time.