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-led teaching spans a broad historical and geographical range across French 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. ​

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. ​
• Medieval France: the chansons de geste, ‘old French’, and early vernacular chronicles; religious tolerance; manuscript culture. ​
• 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.​

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), BA and Leverhulme Trust (International Network; Early Career Fellowship, Research Fellowship), in addition to a number of other funding successes, both external and internal, such as the appointment of a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow:

• Professor Marianne Ailes (PI), ‘Charlemagne: A European Icon. Charlemagne in Different European Cultures’, Leverhulme International Network, 2015-18
• Dr. Ruth Bush, ‘Popular Print and Reading Cultures in Francophone Africa’, AHRC Global Challenges Research Funding 2016-2018 and 'Creative Lives of African Universities', ERC grant, 2021-26
• Dr. Albertine Fox, 'The Art and Politics of Documentary Listening in French and Francophone Women’s Filmmaking (1980-2022)', Faculty Research Fellowship, University of Bristol, 2023-24
• Professor Susan Harrow, 'Letterworlds: epistolarity and the inter-art community in France,1848–1902', Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, 2019-20; ‘Guillaume Apollinaire: A Cultural History for our Times’, University of Bristol Research Fellowship, 2023-24
• Professor Martin Hurcombe, Gender Injustice in Action Sports, British Academy, 2022-23; ‘Access and Active Leisure in a Time of Pandemic: Tales of Two Cities’, Brigstow Institute Collaborative Fellowship, 2021; ‘Active in Lockdown’, QR Strategic Priorities Fund in partnership with Knowle West Media Centre, 2021
• Dr. Philippa Lewis, ‘A Cultural and Literary History of Shyness in Nineteenth-Century France’, Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship 2015-18
• Dr. Damien Mooney, ‘Language and Dialect Death in Béarn, France’, British Academy Small Research Grant, 2016-18, and ‘The participation of sexual minorities in an ongoing sound change: A case study of Paris, France’, British Academy Small Research Grant, 2021-23
• Dr. Alexandra Reza, 'Sarah Maldoror: The Radical Lens of Anticolonial Film', British Academy/Wolfson Fellowship, 2023-26
• Professor Siobhán Shilton, ‘Art and the Arab Spring’, University of Bristol Research Fellowship, 2016-17
• Dr. Clare Siviter, 'Surveilling the Stage: Censorship and Subjectivity in the Age of the Revolution', Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2020-21
• Dr. Bradley Stephens, ‘Masculinity Studies for an Age of Global Uncertainty’, Institute for Advanced Studies Research Workshop Series, 2016-17
• Dr. Federico Testa, ‘Georges Canguilhem, from Pacifism to Resistance. An Alternative History of the Twentieth-Century French Intellectual’, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2021-24
• Dr. Rowan Tomlinson, ‘Scholars, Hacks, and Gentleman: the Politics of Authorship in Renaissance France’, AHRC Leadership Fellowship, 2016-18
• Dr. Rowan Tomlinson, Literary Advisor to M/otherwords, a creative-critical and co-productive knowledge-exchange project funded by the Arts Council.

Associated centres

• Centre for Medieval Studies
• Centre for Black Humanities

Collaborations and activities

The department is currently developing ties with partners across Europe in order to launch a major project on the contrasts and commonalities that have defined public discourses around moments of crisis in modern European history.

Such 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. See also: https://our-research.bristol.ac.uk/co-producing-a-sustainable-future-for-african-literary-production/index.html. 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.