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 seminarContinue reading →
On Friday 10th March 2023, Dr John Stone (Serra Hunter Fellow in English Literature, Universitat de Barcelona) delivered a seminar about his latest research on diasporic populations in Spain between 1640 and 1808 and their libraries, particularly English language dramas and poetry.
Dr Stone opened the seminar by introducing us to the diasporic populations he would be focusing on in the paper. A diaspora refers to a network of ethnically and linguistically related peoples who are often geographically separated from one another. Dr Stone referred primarily to the communities of British and Irish immigrants, mainly Catholics, who were forced from the newly Protestant Great Britain following the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and moved to Spain. They became “islands of English culture”, in Dr Stone’s words. Books and other literary works in their native tongue acted as tools to preserve and further their cultural heritage in a foreign nation.
These communities were incredibly close-knit, and the solidarity between their members was evidenced in the work of the Royal Scots College, a seminary founded in Madrid in 1627. As Dr Stone explained, ordinary families could not import books into Spain. The Scots College, however, had a licence to import almost any text they wanted, and so would take requests from British and Irish diasporic communities to provide them with this connection to their natal land.
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.
Hi Rochelle, what has your university journey been like?
Its’s been a very long one! I studied French and Spanish at A-Level and carried on with those two languages here at Queen’s [in my undergraduate degree]. In my third year, I went to Asturias and took the risky decision to stay there during the Covid pandemic to complete my year abroad. I later returned to Queen’s to complete my final year and started thinking about my next steps. Initially, I wanted to do a PGCE [Postgraduate Certificate in Education] but after speaking to my lecturers I learned about the Master of Research [MRes]. Intrigued, I submitted a proposal, then I was awarded a scholarship to help with funding, and now I am at the end of my Masters with a dissertation deadline this September.
Your dissertation is entitled ‘Female Voices and Testimonies From the España vacía/vaciada’, can you tell me more about this?
Image: cover of Un amor by Sara Mesa
The female voices refer to these texts written by contemporary female Spanish authors: Tierra de mujeres, by Maria Sánchez, Feria by Ana Iris Simón and Un amor by Sara Mesa. They each focus on a unique aspect of the countryside, a motif that has long been discussed in Spanish literature but was recently brought into conversation after Sergio del Molino’s book La España vacía. The title means ‘empty Spain’ but critics challenged that La España ‘vaciada’, meaning ‘Spain emptied’, would have been a more accurate title to describe the changing countryside. His book explored the portrayal of the Spanish countryside and rural to urban migration trends in literature, film and press articles. My dissertation therefore analyses how these three texts dialogue with the concept of ‘España vacía’ and how these texts challenge the mistreatment of the countryside and rural women. I also look at the extent to which these texts can be a form of provocation or activism and if there is a correlation between the success of these texts and the fact there is a wide female readership in Spain.
On Friday 11th February, Dr Sarah Bowskill (Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies, QUB) delivered a seminar entitled ‘Prizes for Spanish American Literature and the Changing Role of the Author in Society’ at the 2021-2022 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Seminar Series. Dr Bowskill’s talk explored the link between power and literary prestige, focusing particularly on how politics underpins Spanish American literary prizes and award ceremonies, and the role of the author in society.
image: cover of Sarah Bowskill’s new monograph
The talk commenced with an overview of the intertwining of literature and politics in Latin America. Dr Bowskill drew on the work of Doris Sommer to explain that in the nineteenth century, post-independence Latin American nations were built by author statesmen, such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre. Writing formed an important part of their political work, and the texts written by these author statesmen were taught in schools, and intended to inspire love for the nation. By the early twentieth century, national prizes for literature were used by the state to further connect literary and political fields. Dr Bowskill highlighted the motivation behind introducing such prizes, since Latin American countries looked to prizes for science and literature as a way to establish international status and national pride.
On the 25th 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.
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)
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?
Laura Kennedy, personal archive
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.
