2021 Annual Conference
The 62nd annual conference of the Society for French Studies was held online between 28th June and 30th June 2021. Please see our news item for the full announcement. For the 2021 conference, we offered registration FREE to all members of the Society.
Quick links
As it happened
Interview with the R. Gapper book prize winner James Williams
In case you missed our prize-giving, here's Pat Crowley's interview with this year's winner of the R. Gapper book prize, James Williams (RHUL). James won the prize for his book Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty (Bloomsbury, 2020).
SFS conference social media takeover
This year, for the duration of our Annual Conference, our social media channels will be run by Graduates and Postgraduates of the Society. Our Social Media Conference Officers will live-tweet aspects of the conference and engage with members on twitter and more widely online. Our social media officers are:
Alice Hagopian (@HagopianAlice) graduated from University College Cork with a Bachelor's degree in World Languages. She wrote her final-year dissertation on female-authored French and Catalan mourning narratives. She is currently studying comparative literature at the University of St Andrews as part of the Crossways in Cultural Narratives Erasmus Mundus Master’s programme. Beside French literature, she is particularly interested in feminist, gender, and disability studies.
Solange Manche (@MancheSolange) is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. She works on contemporary French thought and the relations between the temporalities of finance and individuation. Primarily focussing on the thought of Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, and Frédéric Lordon, other aspects of her research cover the history of Marxism, the reception of Hegel and Marx in France, and social movements.
Fraser McQueen (@FraserJMcQueen) recently completed a PhD at the University of Stirling, researching representations of Islamophobia and community in contemporary French literature and film. He also has research interests in the literature of the far right, the gendered aspects of Islamophobia, and the so-called contemporary ‘culture wars’ in a transnational context. In September, he will be taking up a position as a maître de langues at the Université de Lorraine.
Melissa Pawelski (@MelissaPawelski) has been serving as the SFS Postgraduate Officer for the last two years. She is currently completing her PhD in French Studies at the University of Warwick. Her project examines the English and German translations of Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975) in order to show, through the prism of several key concepts in the book, how the translations significantly differ from the original. Prior to studying translation, she worked on the influence of Foucault’s thought in human geography.
Alexandra Pugh (@allypugh_) is a PhD candidate in the Department of French at King’s College London, supervised by Professor Siobhán McIlvanney and Dr Ros Murray, and funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. She is interested in queer theory, feminism and contemporary literature; her PhD thesis is provisionally entitled 'Reimagining bodies and boundaries through the work of Virginie Despentes: towards a queer-feminist aesthetics'. She has an MSt in Women’s Studies and a BA in History and French, both from the University of Oxford.