Research

The Department of French fosters exploratory world-leading research in the arts and humanities related to France and the wider French-speaking world. ​Our research spans a broad historical and geographical range across French and Francophone Studies, reaching from the medieval period to the 21st century and looking at both France and its former empire. ​We cover a wide and dynamic range of specialisms, including: cultural and socio-political history; film studies; linguistics; literary studies; rhetoric and philosophy; theatre and performance studies; translation; and the visual and contemporary arts. ​

Key research areas

Colleagues develop new understanding and share expertise across disciplinary, geographical and historical areas that represent our internationally recognised departmental strengths:

  • Comparative Cultural Studies: exploring connections between diverse countries and communities in Western Europe, North and West Africa, and Asia. ​
  • Francophone Cultures and Post-Colonial History: the transmission of socio-political and cultural ideas through artistic creation, literary production, and religious practice in French-speaking Africa. ​
  • Gender and Sexuality: the construction of gendered identities through and across the French language and French-speaking cultures; masculinity, femininity, and nationhood. ​
  • Language and Communication: sociolinguistics and language change; rhetoric and the history of French-language critical theory, including psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and deconstruction. ​
  • Literatures from the Medieval to the Contemporary: crossing a range of genres, from manuscripts, poetry and novels to short stories and blogs. ​
  • Modern French History: ranging from the Revolutionary era to the present, ranging from theatre and sport to geo-politics and cultural diplomacy.
  • Politics and Conflict: the intellectual history of political commitment; literatures and cultures of war and occupation, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence.
  • Renaissance History and Culture: the poetics and politics of French vernacular writing in the 16th century; interactions during the early modern period between different disciplines, including natural history. ​
  • Screen Studies: film, video art, and media images.
  • Translation and Adaptation Studies: how French stories travel across different cultures, from Meiji Japan to post-war America, and different media, from print and digital to film and live performance. ​
  • Visual Culture: performance studies; the relationship between word and image, especially since the 19th century; graffiti; installation art; painting; photography; sculpture; performance art; and poetry.​

Current and recent projects

The department played a leading role in the recently completed ‘Charlemagne in England’ project, funded by the AHRC. It has held several major grant awards from the ERC (Starting Grant), AHRC (Leadership Fellowship; Global Challenges Research; Curiosity), British Academy and Leverhulme Trust (International Network; Early Career Fellowship; Research Fellowship), in addition to a number of other funding successes, both external and internal:

Collaborations and activities

Cross-national collaboration is at the heart of our projects exploring multilingual, historically Francophone regions of West Africa via, for example, the exchange agreement with Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar and the AWA project led by Dr Ruth Bush, which established a partnership with the Musée de la Femme-Henriette Bathily in Dakar and digitised an early African women’s magazine. For more information on the project 'Co-producing a Sustainable Future for African Literary Production', see here. We are also involved in a number of active research collaborations with the Université de Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, with whom we operate a co-tutelle agreement for the joint supervision of PhDs. 

Our impact work involves collaborations with national and international partners, such as Professor Hurcombe's work with the International Mountain Bicycling Association and the European Network of Outdoors Sports, and Dr Faucher's work with the Foreign Office. The department also continues to build on previous work that has explored the influence and popularity of French literature, thought, and culture with academic and non-academic audiences, including events at venues in Bristol such as the Watershed Arts Complex, Bristol Old Vic, and the Arnolfini Gallery, as well as at the University with the film and arts festival, Afrika Eye. We also work with partners outside the city, such as the Institut Français and the Mosaic Rooms gallery in London, the Nouvelle Bibliothèque humaniste at Sélestat, and the Société des Amis de Victor Hugo in Paris. With colleagues at Fordham University, New York, we are also developing online resources for learning Old Occitan.

Research postgraduates

In recent years French at Bristol has been highly successful at attracting research postgraduates, many of whom are on scholarships. Current and recent PhD projects include:

  • Danlu Chen: 'Sensation Fiction and Sensory Representation in Later 19th-Century Narrative'
  • Drew Dagnell: 'The Chivalric Man: The Construction and Evolution of Chivalric Masculinity from the 12th to the 15th Century'
  • Kitty Edgerley: 'Towards a New Eden: Locating Female Agency and Privacy in Early Modern Europe'
  • Max Fincher: 'French Loan Words in Early Modern English'
  • Véronique George: 'Chansons de Geste: From Manuscript to Print'
  • Léonie Gschwendtberger: 'Opacity and the Practice of "Recessive Resistance" in Trinh T. Minh-ha's Documentary Films (1982-1991)'
  • Kim Kellas: 'The Châtelain de Coucy en Abyme: Identity Within the 14th-Century Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame du Fayel and the 15th-Century Prose Remaniement’ 
  • Sara Madoré: ‘Discourses of Love and Marriage: Gautier d’Arras and Chrétien de Troyes’ 
  • Louisiane Mailly: 'Exploring Poetic Continents: Representations of Self, Other, and Elsewhere in the Poetry of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953) and Valentine Penrose (1898-1978)'
  • Kareem Othman: 'The Impact of Interpreter Strategies on Communication Effectiveness and Safety in Danger Zones'
  • Caitlin Sturrock: 'Disabling the Enlightenment'
  • Tim Watson: 'Angevin Ideals of Kinship as Represented in Literary Texts'
  • Kathryn Woods: 'Comparing and Translating Queer Intimacies in Fiction by Willa Cather and Colette'

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