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Research

University Square

 

French and Francophone Studies Research Cluster

Director: Dr Janice Carruthers

 

The research profile of French and Francophone Studies spans literature and culture from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century (including postcolonial studies), as well as French linguistics. Most staff are literary specialists working in a variety of periods and from a variety of theoretical perspectives, but with a dominant focus in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Research in that ‘literary’ strand also draws on the history of ideas, the visual arts, gender studies, film, and postcolonial theory. The other research strand is in linguistics, and focuses on sociolinguistics, stylistics, discourse analysis, the syntax of oral French and corpus linguistics.  

In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, 50% of the research in French at Queen's was 3*/4*, i.e. internationally excellent or world-leading.  In the last five years, several members of staff have secured significant research grants.  The largest of these is an AHRC award to Professor Simon Davies for a project availing to produce the first electronic edition of the Correspondence of Bernardin de Saint Pierre.  It is an international collaborative project with partners in the Universities or Exeter and Nottingham, and is part of the Electronic Enlightenment.  Dr Nigel Harkness was awarded a British Academy Research Development Award to work on a monograph entitled  ‘Rêves de Pierre’: Literature, Sculpture, Geology in Nineteenth-Century France.  Dr Maeve McCusker and Dr Janice Carruthers have both had AHRC research leave awards and British Academy small Grants for projects in postcolonial studies and liguistics respectively.

Several researchers play leading roles in interdisciplinary groups within Queen’s.  Simon Davies is Director of the Queen’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS), the largest interdisciplinary Centre in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.  Maeve McCusker is the coordinator of the Postcolonial forum and Nigel Harkness is active in the Gender Forum.

Two key activities in the cluster are the Research Seminar Series and the organisation of international conferences. Our seminar series brings together papers from invited scholars, staff in the cluster, RAs and research students. Recent conferences hosted by the cluster include the Association des Etudes françaises et francophones d’Irlande (2003), the Société des dix-neuviémistes (2005), Peripheries of the Enlightenment (2005) and The conte. Oral and Written Interfaces (2006), André Malraux  and the spiritual values of the 21st century (2007). Our next conference is Chinese Traits, Francophone Lines: writing, art, cinema.

Postgraduate research is fostered within the cluster, and 8 PhD theses are currently being written within French Studies at Queen’s. Students within French are fully integrated into postgraduate activities at School and Faculty level, and play an active role in developments such as the QUEST E-Journal and conference, research seminars and café philo. For further details and to see profiles of our students, please click here.

Click below on staff names for a link to their home page, where you will find details of current research, publications, external collaborations and conference organisation, as well as PhD supervision.

 

Janice Carruthers

Simon Davies

Nigel Harkness

Dominique Jeannerod

John Lewis

Claire Moran

Ros Silvester

Peter Tame