The Study of French in Britain and Ireland, 1720-2009
One-day conference
University Women’s Club, London
20 March 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS
Diana Holmes, Leeds University
Michael Kelly, University of Southampton
Amy Wygant, University of Glasgow
Contributions are sought from scholars working in French studies, history, comparative literature, cultural studies, and collateral disciplines for a one-day conference on the history of the study of French in Britain and Ireland.
Since the first university Chair of Eloquence in the English-speaking world was proposed at St Andrews University in 1720, France and the study of French have been central to questions of pedagogy and identity in British and Irish universities. Now, the future of the discipline as such may well continue to be a function of this past: how departments of French lodged themselves in university faculties, the histories of women who came to universities to take up a subject which they chose or were forced to study, and the broader geo-politics of armed conflict, secularisation, economic boom and bust, and trade relations that impacted upon the institutionalised study of the history, literature and culture of France.
This conference would welcome contributions addressing, for example, the gendering of French, culture wars, both those unique to institutions and those best understood as a function of a national agenda, the historical context of the role or lack thereof of target language teaching, the history of belles lettres in Britain and Ireland, case studies of individual departments where significant, the origins of comparative literature and the history of interdisciplinarity, the history of war and accompanying political concerns which suggested certain responses from the university specific to the study of French, critical studies of individual scholars, filiations, and schools of thought, curricular fashion and the inflections of the modern.
The conference venue, www.universitywomensclub.com, offers graceful and elegant premises on South Audley Street, Mayfair. Overnight accommodation is available for both men and women.
Prospective contributors are invited to send a 300-word proposal for a 30-minute paper toD.Holmes@leeds.ac.uk, M.H.Kelly@soton.ac.uk, and A.Wygant@french.arts.gla.ac.uk by 30 September 2008.
Inquiries are most welcome.
Amy Wygant
Editor, Seventeenth-Century French Studies
www.maney.co.uk/journals/c17