CCWW to Host 2016 SFS Visiting International Fellow

Tuesday 9 June 2015

Professor Barbara Havercroft (Associate Professor, Department of French and Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto) has been awarded the Society for French Studies’ Visiting International Fellowship for 2015-16.

The award will allow her to spend a couple of weeks in the UK in May 2016 and enable her to participate in a number of events. She will give a Society for French Studies lecture and a postgraduate workshop on theories of trauma at the host institution, the University of St Andrews; a research seminar at the University of Edinburgh; a CWWF workshop in London, jointly organised by the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR), and by Queen Mary, University of London.

Barbara Havercroft is a leading scholar in the field of women’s and autobiographical writing and the study of the extrême contemporain. Her work combines sharp theoretical engagement with close textual analysis, to produce thought-provoking studies of agency and narrativity in contemporary literature, especially women’s writing. In the past 15 years, her research has focused on autobiographical narratives of trauma, and she is currently completing a book entitled Trauma et texte dans l’extrême contemporain au féminin. In the past decade, she co-edited the following landmark studies: Vies en récit: Formes littéraires et médiatiques de la biographie et de l’autobiographie (Québec: Éditions Nota bene, 2007); Le roman français de l’extrême contemporain: écritures, engagements, énonciations (Québec: Éditions Nota bene, 'Contemporanéités' collection, 2010); Narrations d’un nouveau siècle: romans et récits français (2001-2010) (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012).

These events will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of 20th- and 21st-century French literature and women writers, autobiographical texts; representations of personal trauma (incest, rape, illness, etc.); literary theory (feminist theory, feminist theories of autobiography, trauma theories).

The nomination was made jointly by Elise Hugueny-Léger (School of Modern Languages/ Institute for Contemporary and Comparative Literature, University of St Andrews), Susan Bainbrigge (School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh), Shirley Jordan (School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, University of London), and Gill Rye (IMLR, University of London).