Research Interests
Open to PhD applications in:
- Nineteenth-century French literature and questions of medicine, gender and/or religion
- Modern (19th/20th/21st-century) French illness/patient narratives
- French literature and illness, disease, pain; French Thanatology
- Literary representations of medical practice, care and experience
Public outreach & key achievements
From April 2018 - January 2019 I was an AHRC Leadership Fellow working on a project entitled Global Disease: Language(s) and the Literary Imagination.
Along with Prof. Pascal McKeown (School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences), I was project leader of the QUB Health Humanities interdisciplinary research network in 2014-15. I am currently a Member of the Peer-Review Committee for the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowships (FLF) Scheme and the British Academy's Knowledge Frontiers Programme: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects.
I am Assistant Editor of French Studies Bulletin. I am also on the executive committee of ADEFFI (L'Association des études françaises et francophones d'Irlande) and am a member of the Society of Dix-neuviémistes (having served on the Society's executive as Membership Secretary from 2012-15 and again in 2016-17), the Society for French Studies, the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF) and the Association for Medical Humanities. I am also a member of the International Health Humanities Network.
Research students
| PhD area | The Mythopoetics of Bodily Representation in the Works of George Sand |
| Name |
James Illingworth |
| Years of study | 2014-2018 |
| Country | England |
| PhD area | Multimodality in Contemporary Women’s French Writing |
| Name | Poppy Boyd |
| Years of study | 2014-2018 |
| Country | Northern Ireland |
| PhD area | Against the Grain: The Poetics of Non-Normative Masculinity in Decadent French Literature |
| Name | Mathew Rickard |
| Years of study | 2015-2019 |
| Country | Northern Ireland |
| PhD area | Gender Experimentalism in French Women’s Writing of the fin de siècle |
| Name | Rachael Stockdale |
| Years of study | 2015-2019 |
| Country | Northern Ireland |
| PhD area | The Descendants of Eve: Rewriting the Fall in Nineteenth-Century French Literature |
| Name | Jayne Duff |
| Years of study | 2019-2022 |
| Country | Northern Ireland |
| PhD area | Religious Imagery in Nineteenth-Century French Slavery Narratives |
| Name | Helen McKelvey |
| Years of study | 2018-2021 |
| Country | Northern Ireland |
| PhD area | Loss and Mourning in Contemporary, Parental Récits de deuil |
| Name | Jordan McCullough |
| Years of study | 2019-2022 |
| Country | Northern Ireland |