Tag Archives: French

Postgraduate student interviews: Zoe Coyle (MRes)

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2024-2025

The MRes project

Zoe’s research project is focusing on the ways in which violent resistance to France has been represented, and repressed, in Martinique and Guadeloupe since they became French départements (rather than colonies) in 1946. She detailed how although these islands are often seen as dependent on France, or even passive, there has been a long history of resistance. Her project will use literature to explore how this resistant relationship with La Métropole [‘mainland’ France] has been represented at key moments of public uprising. This project will challenge the assumption and idea that these islands are simply reliant on France. Zoe will also consider the two islands in a wider context of protest across the postcolonial francophone world, as seen most recently in New Caledonia and Mayotte.

Academic background

Zoe studied French, Spanish and History at A Level, and suggested that it was her interest in history that first sparked her interest into départementalisation [the process by which certain French colonies were made into official departments of France in 1946] and the effects that residual colonialism has left on the outre-mer territories [French overseas territories]. After A Level, Zoe went on to study French and Spanish at QUB at undergraduate level.

Genesis of the project

As Zoe mentioned before, her interest in history and historical events greatly influenced her decision to research this topic. At university level, there were certain modules that also piqued her interest into this chosen pathway. In final year, she first got a taste for independent research after taking the ‘2666 by Roberto Bolaño’ module in Spanish [taught by Professor Sarah Bowskill]. This module gave her the opportunity to explore her own avenues of research and develop her own areas of interest. Similarly, it gave her the tools to navigate independent research – tools which have served her well over her undergraduate degree and into her postgraduate studies.

The module that steered her towards her interest in postcolonial studies was the final year ‘Caribbean Cultures’ module with Professor Maeve McCusker. It was Zoe’s first time studying the topic during this module, and she described how it was fundamental in her decision about her research topic. She discussed how this module demonstrated the importance and relevance of the breadth of francophone cultures, and how there is a much richer tapestry of la francophonie [the global community of French-speaking people and countries] than just France.

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Postdoctoral researcher interviews: Dr Emma Humphries

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2024-2025

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Dr Emma Humphries to find out more about her academic career and current areas of interest.

Currently a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Arts, English and Languages at QUB, Emma began her academic career in Nottingham, where she studied French and Spanish at undergraduate level. Her love for the French language was piqued during her dissertation project relating to public reaction towards the long-awaited feminisation of professional titles in the 1990s. With support from her mentors, this love of French soon prompted Emma to embark on an MRes project examining prescriptivism on social media.

What is prescriptivism you might ask? Simply put, this is when someone corrects and critiques someone else’s use of language – whether in oral or written format. Emma has found that people can feel very strongly about the ‘correct’ use of language, suggesting that language is an intrinsic part of one’s identity and culture. Prescriptivism thus became the main focus of her academic career, with her PhD exploring language columns in the late 1800s in France in comparison to similar online sources. Interestingly, these publications were formatted much like a column in local newspapers so that members of the public could write to the author with specific language queries (i.e. how to spell/pronounce/use certain language) that would be addressed in the bi-weekly publication.

In a contemporary context, Emma places great emphasis on the influence of social media and how this has impacted the use of language – she stresses that with the advent of comment sections, we now have large bodies of empirical evidence of prescriptivism, data which we did not have access to before. This renders the study of prescriptivism more quantifiable and therefore feasible, allowing researchers such as Emma to truly shine a light on this phenomenon.

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The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire, 28 February 2025 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2024-2025.

I recently enjoyed attending a seminar led by Dr Doyle Calhoun, University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. This seminar sought to explore a long-overlooked consequence of the violence of French colonialism: suicide. Often uttered in whispered tones, suicide to this day remains a taboo subject, the elephant in the room that people wish to avoid discussing.

However, through his work Dr Calhoun has shone a light on the historical occurrence of suicide as an act of resistance to colonial violence, with specific reference to the time of slavery in the French-speaking Caribbean. Dr Calhoun discussed colonial records as well as contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean media and Senegalese oral history in order to reconstruct a history of the experiences of suicide among enslaved populations and their ancestors. The genesis of Dr Calhoun’s work lies in his finding that suicide was either obscured or omitted entirely in French colonial documents. Given that suicide had not previously been considered in the context of colonial violence, Dr Calhoun’s work offers a groundbreaking historical analysis, demonstrating the sombre paradoxical idea that accounts of suicide offer a fleeting glimpse into the lives of enslaved people.

Dr Calhoun began by unpacking the notion of a ‘suicide archive’; the function it performs and the questions that arise as a result. The suicide archive reflects a scholarly desire to recover stories lost or untold. However, what authority do modern scholars possess to ‘rewrite’ such a contentious part of history? How can scholars elevate the identities of those enslaved peoples lost to suicide whilst maintaining a respectful and reverent attitude regarding their humanity? Is the very act of analysing and elevating these lost identities disrespectful in itself? What if these people did not want to be remembered? Whilst the intention to bring to light these historic injustices is noble, Dr Calhoun crucially emphasised that this work must be carried out in a respectful and delicate manner.

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French Studies and the Medical Humanities: Critical Intersectionalities (Travel Bursary write-up)

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This post, published in 2024-2025, is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2023-2024.

The conference “French Studies and the Medical Humanities: Critical Intersectionalities” took place at the University of London’s Institute of Languages, Cultures, and Societies on the 3^rd and 4^th of September, 2024. I was fortunate to be able to attend with the support of a Modern Languages MRes Travel Bursary from the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group.

As part of a strategic effort to de-centre anglophone perspectives and broaden the linguistic horizons of the field, the conference sought to highlight the importance of linguistic and cultural sensitivity in ongoing conversations about medical experiences. Paper topics included critical disability studies, environmental anxiety, bibliotherapy, and narrative medicine.

In her paper titled “L’affaire Anne Bert: Assisted dying between law and literature”, keynote speaker Anna Elsner (University of St Gallen) discussed how individual narratives are co-opted by politicians and governments to shape the lawmaking process. She highlighted the example of Anne Bert, a former court-appointed legal guardian who became a writer later in life. After being diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) in 2015, she publicly campaigned for changes in France’s legislation surrounding assisted dying, before travelling to Belgium to seek an assisted death in 2017. This decision was subject to widespread debate in the French media and parliament. Elsner’s paper encouraged attendees to de-centre their own perspectives and allow both the medical humanities and French studies to enrich each other through their mutual engagement.

Of particular interest to my own project was a panel titled “Disability and Clinical Environments”. In her paper on disability in the works of Samuel Beckett, Molly Crozier (University of St Andrews) discussed the networks of care that exist outside of traditional medical settings and the intimacy involved in caring relationships, especially in light of the capacity of interpersonal relationships to cause more harm than good. Áine Larkin (Maynooth University) then analysed how the documentary La Permanence by Alice Diop centres the patient and their subjectivity in its depiction of the clinical encounter, and how it positions vulnérabilité (vulnerability) alongside the French values of liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality, fraternity). These papers helped me think about the caring relationships depicted in my own corpus texts, and pointed to useful sources that helped me shape the conclusion of my MRes dissertation.

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The Power of Play: Comparative Caribbean Carnival Cultures from Leeds to Martinique, 16 October 2024 – Seminar write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2024-2025.

On Wednesday 16^th October 2024, for Black History Month, Professor Emily Zobel Marshall gave a talk on her research and involvement in carnival and its role in society. Her talk, ‘The Power of play: Comparative Caribbean Carnival Cultures from Leeds to Martinique’ took us on a journey explaining the beginnings of Caribbean carnival culture through to its worldwide impact today.

Red Devil troupe at Martinique Carnival, March 2024, photographed by Emily Zobel Marshall

Professor Zobel Marshall, being ‘Martinican royalty’ (according to Professor Maeve McCusker who chaired the talk) due to her famous grandfather, spoke briefly about her connection with Martinican author Joseph Zobel, and how this lineage had influenced her interests and research from an early age. Although an esteemed academic, Professor Zobel Marshall explained how her research into carnival culture was an endeavor to ‘blur the lines between academia and art’ through various projects. She spoke of this breaking down of barriers between the academic and artistic worlds and detailed just how important that is for her.

The beginnings of carnival culture across the Caribbean islands, according to Professor Zobel Marshall, started as something of a mélange culturel, or cultural mixing. She spoke of the initial introduction of the masquerade (today known familiarly as ‘mas’) as hybrid cultural form – a fusion of the religious rituals of French Catholic colonisers and the musical and performance traditions of enslaved Africans. As a form of resistance, enslaved peoples further developed their own version of the masquerade where plantation owners could be mocked and ridiculed, giving power to the disempowered.

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Postgraduate student interviews: Lauren McShane (PhD, French)

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2022-2023.

What has your academic trajectory been so far?

I really enjoyed languages at school. I studied Spanish at GCSE and took French just before GCSE, and I decided to continue them. I did an undergraduate degree in French and Spanish, and decided that I hadn’t had enough of French. I really wanted to keep going so I decided to continue on to MRes because I wanted to work in a research-led, more heavily dissertation-weighted kind of course, and I didn’t think the taught programs, like the MAs, were as good a fit. I did an MRes on medical humanities and French culture, even though I had never studied medical humanities before. The MRes is a good space to discover something completely new. I really wanted to keep this going, so I decided to apply for a PhD (which you absolutely do not have to do if you get an MRes!). The MRes sets you up well for it; you get the chance to explore other areas of the School and get a chance to experiment with some more independent work.

What are you currently working on, and why did you choose the topic?

I’m still within the medical humanities, I really enjoy it. While I was doing my MRes, I got really interested in broader networks of people. So, for example, I was looking at one person suffering with alcoholism, but I became interested in what the experience for other people around them might be like and what their lived experience of care is like. I decided to put together a PhD project with my supervisor on narratives of family alcoholism. I’m looking at people who have grown up with an alcoholic mum or dad and how they write about their lived experience and have come to understand health care and their parent’s experience. For me, it really grew out of my MRes project. I will say that that the project did change post-proposal, so there’s nothing wrong with you or the project if it has to change. The research evolves and grows with you.

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Postgraduate Research in Progress Showcase, Friday 24 March 2023 – Seminar Write-up

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2022-2023.

On 24 March 2023, the Queen’s University Belfast Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group hosted the Postgraduate Research in Progress session as part of their ongoing seminar series. The seminar was chaired by PhD candidate Ciara Gorman, with fellow PhD researchers Sijie Mou (Linguistics), Rebecca Gosling (French), and Laura Kennedy (French) presenting their work. The main theme of the seminar was addressing the challenges that arise when trying to complete a piece of work as substantial as a doctoral thesis.

Laura, Rebecca, and Sijie at one of their preparatory meetings for the seminar

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2022: A Celebration of Recent Publications in Modern Languages panel

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This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2021-2022.

On Friday 20 May 2022, Queen’s University Belfast hosted the annual Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase. The event emphasised the wealth of research recently undertaken by the Core Disciplinary Research Group at Queen’s. The Celebration of Recent Publications in Modern Languages panel session in particular highlighted some recently published work from three Queen’s lecturers, Dr Dominique Jeannerod (French), Dr Síobhra Aiken (Irish) and Professor Maeve McCusker (French). The panel was chaired by Laura Kennedy, a current PhD student in French.

Image: cover of Dominique Jeannerod’s monograph

Dr Dominique Jeannerod, interviewed by Mark O’Rawe, a PhD student in French, provided an overview of his monograph entitled La Passion de San-Antonio: Frédéric Dard et ses lecteurs (Presses universitaires Savoie Mont Blanc, 2021). La Passion de San-Antonio considers the readers of San-Antonio book series by French crime writer, Frédéric Dard. Dr Jeannerod explained how he, like millions of others, grew up in France reading the San-Antonio books. However, these novels were perceived as anti-literature due to a variety of socio-cultural factors, ranging from their aggressive market orientation to Dard’s grotesque humour and idiosyncratic use of French slang. As a result, the San-Antonio books were to be read outside of the classroom. Despite or indeed because of this lack of institutional recognition, the collection of novels has enjoyed a very diverse readership. Dr Jeannerod’s research work on this topic focuses on the relationship between the reader and the author, asking questions about who the readers of San-Antonio are, how they read, and what their assumptions or prejudices might be. In the interview, Dr Jeannerod discussed the varying trends in the San-Antonio readership across generations, which saw the novel’s popularity decrease around the 1990s. The conversation with Dr Jeannerod concluded by looking forward to the return of San-Antonio in multimedia form, with the anticipated release of a TV series, based on the book series.

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: PhD Flashtalks

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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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