Tag Archives: French

Postgraduate student interviews: Lauren McShane (PhD)

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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Postgraduate student interviews: Jordan McCullough (PhD)

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

Interview with Jordan McCullough, second year PhD student at QUB.

So, Jordan, what has been your university trajectory so far?

I studied French and Spanish at Queen’s, then continued on to do an MRes, with a dissertation examining end of life care in France, from the perspective of the patient and their family. While completing this, I felt like I would like to take things further and see where it might take me. I applied for PhD funding whilst I was still doing my MRes, got funded by Northern Bridge and here I am now, in the second year of my PhD!

What is the topic of your current research project?

My project looks at parental grief narratives, that is, writing by parents who have lost children for a variety of different causes, such as terminal illness, suicide, violent death, terrorist attacks or even accidental death. There are a wide range of causes of death but what I’m trying to do with that is to find out, first of all, what makes the parents write; what do they get out of it themselves, and what do they give to their children through this idea of continuing bonds and ongoing legacy, and secondly, what drives these parents to go beyond writing for themselves and their child and publish their text, and what changes when there’s a readership and an audience involved.

What has been the most interesting part of your research so far?

By far, the most interesting aspect of my research journey has been the short placement I undertook with the regional paediatric palliative care team in Brittany. It was wonderful to see how my research might have some sort of positive impact in the everyday lives of parents grieving the loss of their child. I learnt a lot from the staff at the unit and I think I was able to give something back in return. All being well, I hope to get back across to France next year to spend some more time with the team.

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Postgraduate student interviews: Laura Kennedy (PhD)

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

From Paris to London to Queen’s, we caught up with Laura Kennedy to learn about her global PhD French project and her advice for undergraduates considering postgraduate study.

Q. What has your journey to PhD been like?

It’s been enjoyable, but unexpected. My B.A was in French studies at the University of London Institute in Paris. In my final year, I took a French colonialism class, and became really interested, particularly in Algeria. My interests have always been in literature and postcolonial literature was the perfect overlap. I did my final year dissertation on Kamel Daoud and his book Meursault, contre-enquête. The next step for me was to get a theoretical base of postcolonial scholarship. Once I graduated, I worked for a year in Paris and researched Masters programs. I found SOAS University of London. They did a Masters in Comparative Literature of Africa and Asia which I completed in 2020. SOAS was a watershed moment for me academically; I could focus in on my interests which I came to realize were language politics and postcolonial novels. Once I realized this, I put PhD proposals together – I wasn’t going to stop after the Masters. I felt like I would be an outsider coming to Queen’s at PhD. I’m happy to be mistaken on that. Within weeks, I felt welcome and part of the community.

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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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