Category Archives: Events 2020-2021

Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: PhD Flashtalks

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25^th of June, six candidates from the current PhD cohort at Queen’s University Belfast shared a session entitled ‘PhD Flashtalks’ during the Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021. Dr Ricki O’Rawe participated as the chair.

Margaret Cunningham, who is a second year PhD candidate in French, began the session with a synopsis of her thesis project, which carries the working title ‘Narratives of Disaster in the French Caribbean’. Margaret believes that in the Caribbean context, the French departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique have been largely overlooked in studies of catastrophe. Thus, Margaret has made this silence the focus of her thesis, examining disaster narratives against the backdrop of a colonial and specifically slave past.

Next, Annie Jowett, a first-year Ph.D. student in Irish, discussed her thesis on ‘The Irish Dialect of South Leinster: The Onomastic Evidence’. Through her research, Annie aspires to address and contribute to the gap in linguistic knowledge about the Irish language and discover where the Irish spoken in South Leinster fits into the dialect continuum of the Irish language in Ireland. The Irish language has been obsolete in South Leinster since the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, the linguistic history of the region is complex in terms of language contact; Annie gave the example of the survival of an Old English dialect named Yola which survived in the South-East of the province until the late nineteenth century. Annie is employing placenames in the region as her primary source of dialect evidence, intending to focus on the distribution of stress patterning in local pronunciations.

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Critical Interactions panel

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25^th of June 2021, Dr Dominique Jeannerod (PhD supervisor in French at Queen’s University), Dr Ashley Harris (former PhD student and departmental colleague until end of June 2021) and Ciara Gorman (current PhD supervisee) delivered a session entitled ‘Critical Interactions’ at the Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021. The trio of speakers aimed to highlight how their different respective research objects share structural and methodological affinities translating into common lines of enquiries. The overarching title for their collaborative paper, a preview of a joint panel at the (then) upcoming Society for French Studies conference 2021, was ‘Crime on the Margins: Peripheries, Alienation and Criminalisation of Women’. Whilst each of the three researchers is investigating different time periods and corpuses of French crime fiction, film and media, their papers incorporate many cross-cutting themes. These parallels include marginalization as well as space, place and liminality.

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Child-centred Art at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Possibilities

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25th of June, as keynote speaker of the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Research Showcase of 2021, Professor Nuala Finnegan of University College Cork gave a plenary lecture entitled ‘Child-centred Art at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Possibilities’.

Professor Finnegan began her lecture by showing an image of Donald Trump on the cover of Time magazine in June 2018, in which Trump is depicted looking down on a distressed child crying. This is a reconfiguration of a now infamous image, wherein this child is watching her mother being searched at the U.S.-Mexico border. This brought us to the child separation process of April 2018 during the Trump administration, and the inhumanity of this.

Professor Finnegan identified three primary tropes of representation of children at the border: children as dead, distressed, or imprisoned. She criticised the lack of integrity shown within the fields of journalism and politics regarding such representations, as the migrant child and their trauma has often been used for political photo opportunities, or as disaster pornography in humanitarian campaigns. Professor Finnegan therefore covered the faces of children and migrants in the images she used throughout the lecture to respect their privacy and agency. She considered what happens when other representations of children enter the fray, asking: how does this disrupt the narrative?

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Lived Experiences Roundtable

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

While the importance of research has been placed centre stage during the current Coronavirus crisis, it is often still valorised solely based on quantifiable impact. The Modern Languages Research Showcase, held on Friday 25 June 2021, emphasized how research undertaken in the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group goes beyond this reductive ideal to be informed by and interrogate real lived experiences, both that of researchers themselves and those of others. The Lived Experiences roundtable, chaired by Dr Rosalind Silvester and Dr. Steven Wilson, foregrounded this multi-directional focus through two PhD students’ work.

Kathryn Nelson defies research’s perceived narrow focus in her trans-disciplinary project examining the role of cultural intermediaries in distributing environmental artwork in Northern Ireland. A practising artist, informed by her MSc in Ecological Management and Conservation and by her childhood connection to nature in South Devon, she articulated her lived experience of its woods and coastline through video, an experience she fears will not be shared by children today. Her own installations have tackled what she called ‘regime shifts’ (Scheffer et. al. 2009), where the smallest details accumulate to form tipping points of irreversible damage, narrating the linear past, present and future life of our oceans, underlining how solutions to these problems are cultural. We must reimagine our culture/nature divide to forge a new eco-culture where all of us understand our unique place in the biome. This was brought to the forefront in the Tate Modern’s exposition of Damien Hirst’s In and Out of Love where curators culturally sanctioned the consumption of the lived experience of dying butterflies for aesthetic pleasure as ‘good art’ and led to our misunderstanding of the vital role these animals play. Far from art being for art’s sake, we depend on cultural intermediaries to influence our understanding of this new world through revaluations of the relationship between consumer and art.

Fig. 1 (left): Current Inshore Marine Life with Taxonomic Labels
Fig. 2 (right): Possible Future – Simplified Marine Life with No Labels… (Artwork by Kathryn and Roy Nelson)

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Lexical Innovation and Terminological Advice in Breton and French: The Role of Online Spaces, 12 March 2021 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On Friday the 12^th of March 2021, I attended Dr Merryn Davies-Deacon’s talk on Lexical Innovation and Terminological Advice in Breton and French: The Role of Online Spaces. I was intrigued by this presentation, because as part of my level 2 studies, I completed an assignment on the regional language of Breton as a token of identity. Furthermore, after having spent my year abroad in Spain, I became familiar with attitudes towards Spanish regional languages, and so, I was eager to find out more about the situation with regional languages in France.

Merryn’s talk certainly satisfied my desire for more information on the Breton language. Firstly, she broke down the complex title so that those who are not experts on the topic (like myself) were able to grasp it. From my understanding, lexical innovation involves words and phrases that Breton speakers coin from other languages, such as English and French, and adopt as part of their own dialogue. Terminological advice, however, involves the influences and guidance of official sources and authorities. As the focus of Merryn’s research was on online spaces, she delved into what the internet and social media means for the evolution of the Breton language. She raised the possibility of the internet being a leveling space, as it is a tool that all speakers can use to give their input. However, she juxtaposed this theory with the suggestion that given the Internet is subject to the control of authorities who own it, in fact, it replicates hierarchies instead of being an equal space.

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Narrations of Suffering and Recovery, PGR Research in Progress Workshop, 26 February 2021 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021. It brings together write-ups, by three different undergraduate students, of presentations given as part of a Research in Progress Workshop by Postgraduate Research Students in Modern Languages on 26 February 2021. The talks covered were by Margaret Cunningham, Jordan McCullough, and Bushra Kalakh, and the workshop was chaired by Dr Ricki O’Rawe.

Margaret Cunningham, French

Anyone who has read a historical novel will know that fictional writing can recover and reinvent the past in ways which rejuvenate long forgotten narratives and perspectives. This quality of historical fiction is particularly important in post-colonial contexts where indigenous and local stories are too easily overlooked and silenced. In her talk on the 26^th February, Margaret Cunningham (PhD student in French at QUB) gave a fascinating insight into this topic.

In a presentation entitled ‘Multiperspectivity and Memory: Rewriting Disaster in the French Caribbean’, Margaret addressed disaster literature in the French Caribbean, with particular focus on fictional accounts of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique. In this presentation, Margaret examined the ways in which Martinican author Daniel Picouly bears witness to and measures the cultural effects of this disaster in his book Quatre-vingt-dix secondes (90 Seconds).

The French Caribbean, Margaret explained, has a long history of suffering. Not only is it vulnerable to natural disaster, but French colonization meant that the islands have a turbulent history, rife with tyranny and social unrest. Because of this, there is a contentious social climate in Martinique, with controversy surrounding memories and intense debate over which anniversaries should be celebrated. Margaret argued that literature plays a crucial role in navigating debate surrounding Martinique’s troubled past and becomes a vehicle to produce new cultural memory. Through the fictional rewriting of real historical events, authors can recover and reinvent the past, repressing trauma and prioritizing certain perspectives and narratives.

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Portuguese Cultural Events, 8 and 11 December 2020

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In December we again hosted our by now traditional annual Portuguese cultural event, supported by the Instituto Camões and organised by our Camões Tutor, Vítor Fernandes. The constraints on physical movement and gathering in 2020 became an opportunity as the shift to the online mode allowed us to organise not one but two events in the same week, via video call! We were delighted to host fascinating conversations with well-known Portuguese journalists and writers Alexandra Lucas Coelho (on the topic “Between Brazil and Portugal”, led by Tori Holmes, Senior Lecturer in Brazilian Studies) and Joana Gorjão Henriques (on “Contemporary Portugal: Challenges”, led by Maria Tavares, Senior Lecturer in Portuguese Studies). Both events were held in English and open to students, researchers, and members of the Portuguese-speaking community.

Echoes of 18th-Century Spanish Literature in the British Romantic Press, 4 December 2020 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

The final seminar talk of the Semester 1 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group series took place on Friday 4^th December. The seminar, ‘Echoes of 18^th-century Spanish literature in the British Romantic Press’, was presented by Dr Leticia Villamediana (Hispanic Studies, University of Warwick).

Dr Villamediana began by contextualising her research, explaining that it is part of a larger project with universities in the UK and Spain. The project, ‘Hispanic Literature in the British Romantic Periodical Press: Appropriating and Rewriting the Canon’, aims to build a map of British Hispanism in the Romantic period by exploring Hispanic literature featured in the British periodical press between 1802 and 1832. Reviews of Spanish literature in British periodicals helped to broaden readers’ knowledge of foreign culture and played a role in shaping public opinion.

British interest in Spanish history, culture and literature emerged only in the beginning of the 19^th century, the cause of this being the Peninsular War. In the eyes of Great Britain, Spanish literature had previously been regarded as backward and the antithesis of Enlightenment ideals. However, during the Romantic era, reviews of Spanish literature and other foreign works began to appear more prominently in British periodical publications, such as Richard Phillip’s The Monthly Magazine. Periodicals such as these aimed to show the progression of the liberal arts in different countries and published a list of Spanish works and authors. Over time, the section increased, showing the growing interest in the field. The press gave a positive review of Spain and praised its literary progress. Robert Southey, a leading Hispanist of the Romantic period, was a notable contributor to these periodicals. He translated many Spanish Romance texts, wrote a History of the Peninsular War, and was responsible for the publication of a new section on Spanish poetry in The Monthly Magazine.

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The Contact Zones of Disease, 16 October 2020 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On Friday 16^th October 2020, Dr Steven Wilson (French, QUB) gave a talk on his research on ‘The Contact Zones of Disease: Sites of Infection and Contagion in the Nineteenth-Century French Syphilis Narrative’. This seminar talk was the first of the Semester 1 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group series. The talk centred on how we use the language of infection, infestation and warfare to talk about the diseased body, the concept of borders in our understanding of disease, and the representations of syphilis in 19^th century French literature.

Credit: A shield to protect against syphilis represented as a skull. Lithograph, 1924/1930. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

I found the introduction of the talk to be particularly interesting as, using an example from Donald Trump, Dr Wilson described how the American President uses the language of infestation to talk about immigrants, saying that they ‘infest’ the country. This language would normally be used to describe a poisonous insect or animal, but Trump uses it to express his fear of immigrants crossing the border and, more importantly, to mark them as a threat to public health. Derogatory language like this is unpleasant to hear, but it is not a new concept. For centuries, we have been using the language of infectious diseases to describe the borders and boundaries that mediate human contact. Even now, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, travellers crossing borders must quarantine to prevent the spread of the disease, and positive cases are forced to isolate. All of this causes us to regard the diseased body as the dangerous body, something that must be contained in order to protect the lives of others, and a border as something that keeps us safe. Moreover, Western societies are obsessed with the image of disease-carrying immigrants and feel threatened by the idea of the ‘contact zone’, or the spaces where cultures meet. The deadliest pandemic of the 20^th century was called the Spanish influenza as the first cases were diagnosed in Spain, and even today, we have the ‘Chinese virus’, as labelled by Trump. These examples highlight how the language of borders is deeply ingrained in how diseases are represented and understood.

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