Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship

For the 2024 round of the Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship we received 12 applications. The jury was composed of the President (Diana Holmes) and Vice-President (Nicholas Harrison) of the Society, with three external members who we thank warmly for their time and careful, fair and rigorous judgment: Professors Martine Reid (Lille), Martin Munro (Florida State) and Susan Harrow (Bristol). The standard of entries was very high, which in itself is evidence of the thriving research environment at the early career level of French Studies in the UK and Ireland, and an excellent indicator of how bright and exciting the future looks. The jury was greatly impressed by the considerable amount of work and care that clearly went into articulating each project, gathering together all the supporting material, and liaising with relevant individuals in the institutions involved.

The Fellowship is awarded to Solange Manche, for a project that includes both the reworking and publication of her doctoral thesis and the development of a new postdoctoral project provisionally entitled ‘Planning for a Better Life in the Anthropocene: Traces of the Third World in Contemporary French Philosophy and Heterodox Economics’. The Fellowship will be held at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge.

The runner-up was Laura Kennedy, for a proposal to revise for publication as a monograph her doctoral thesis on the ‘Politics and Poetics of Language in Francophone and Anglophone World Literature’.

We warmly commend the winning entry, the runner-up and the very high quality of all 12 entries.

It should be noted that Solange was awarded the Fellowship as a reserve candidate, after it was initially offered to Liam Lewis, who (for the second time) was unable to accept the award, for the excellent reason that during the judging process he gained a full-time academic post. Liam should also be warmly congratulated.

We received a record number of applications for the Postdoctoral Fellowship competition in 2022 - 18 - and all were of a very high standard, which in itself is evidence of the thriving research environment at the early career level of French Studies in the UK and Ireland, and an excellent indicator of how bright and exciting the future looks. The jury was greatly impressed by the considerable amount of work and care that clearly went into articulating each project, gathering together all the supporting material, and liaising with relevant individuals in the institutions involved.

From the first round of assessment, a shortlist of the strongest 5 emerged. These were:

• Benjamin Dalton, for a project on Catherine Malabou, the relation of her theorizing of plasticity to contemporary literature and film, and an emerging related project on the hospital.
• Ashley Harris, for a project on activist art of the banlieue.
• Raphaёl Jaudon, for a project on the politics and film aesthetics of cannibalistic feminism.
• Liam Lewis, on Medieval Natures, Translating Ecological Crisis and Sustainability
• Fraser McQueen, for a project on masculinity and far-right literature, with an emphasis on anti-semitism and islamophobia.

It was in our view a considerable accomplishment to make it through to the shortlist, and all were highly commended. We are delighted to award the SFS Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2022-23 to Benjamin Dalton, who worked on his project at the University of Birmingham.

It should be noted that Ben was awarded the Fellowship as a reserve candidate, after it was initially offered to Liam Lewis, who was unfortunately unable to accept the award, but who should also be warmly congratulated.

We are pleased to announce that two early career researchers have received awards in the 2020 round of the scheme. Polly Galis will take up her fellowship at the University of Bristol, where she will develop a project on sex workers' narratives; Giulia Boitani will be based at the University of Cambridge where she will turn her thesis into a book (Family Matters: Founding Women in Medieval French Prose Romances).

Congratulations, Polly and Giulia!