Strengthening French Studies

Strengthening French Studies at Somerville

Brexit may have altered the landscape for the teaching of modern languages. But French studies continue to thrive undaunted at Somerville with the help of a generous in memoriam gift from an anonymous donor, explains Professor Simon Kemp,

Somerville’s Tutorial Fellow in the subject.

In October 2020, we welcomed one of the largest and most diverse cohorts of Freshers the college has ever seen to the subject to explore the first-year literature course which runs from the medieval narrative poem of love and jealousy, La Chatelaine de Vergy to Marie NDiaye’s twenty-first-century satire, Papa doit manger. At the other end of the degree course, meanwhile, all of our finalists opted to begin their Final Honours School studies by delving into the modern period of literature. They will start their journey with classics of nineteenth-century French Realism, after which they will head off in different directions through our newly revised and expanded course options, which welcome significant new voices from the francophone Arab world, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, alongside European poets, novelists and playwrights. In French language teaching, changes in immigration rules following Brexit forced us to end our longstanding arrangement with the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon to send us annually a lecteur or lectrice who would hold our students’ conversation classes and other speaking and listening practice alongside their own studies. In its place, we are delighted to have been able to create a new post of Lecturer in French Language for the college, which combines the lecteur role with that of our former part-time language instructor. We are very pleased to welcome Dr Christophe Barnabé to the post this coming term, and look forward to the opportunities this presents to reinvent our spoken and written language provision and its relationship to the literary and cultural side of the course.

Professor Simon Kemp and Dr Christophe Barnabé. Photo: John Cairns In October 2020, we welcomed one of the largest and most diverse cohort of Freshers the college has ever seen.

At a research level, I am continuing to supervise doctoral projects on Iris Murdoch’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy, on illness and existentialist thought, and on Samuel Beckett’s translations of his own work between French and English, while welcoming a new doctoral researcher who will examine representations of mental illness in contemporary women’s writing. In my own research, I am currently writing on theories of mind and their use in literary studies.