Submitted by Administrator on Thu, 21/01/2016 - 12:25
The Cambridge French Graduate Conference, organised by and for postgraduate students from Cambridge and around the world, will be held on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 May. The Conference is currently accepting submissions for papers on the theme of “stains” in French literature and culture.
The Cambridge French Graduate Conference, organised by and for postgraduate students from Cambridge and around the world, will be held on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 May. The Conference is currently accepting submissions for papers on the theme of “stains” in French literature and culture.
The Cambridge French Graduate Conference has run for over ten years, and has become a highly respected annual event in the academic community. The Conference is a unique occasion for graduate students from all over the UK as well as from France and elsewhere around the globe, to meet and exchange ideas. In 2015, the Conference hosted speakers from as far away as Quebec. Proceedings of the Conference are expected to be published, providing an important milestone and opportunity for early publication for many of the speakers.
This year’s Conference has two internationally renowned keynote speakers: Pierre Bayard, of Université Paris VIII, and Laura McMahon of the University of Cambridge. In addition to his professorship in French Literature, Pierre Bayard is a psychoanalyst and writer, whose best-known work How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read was released in 2007 to great critical acclaim and has been translated into 30 languages. He has also published on Freud, Proust and detective fiction. Laura McMahon is a lecturer in French at Gonville and Caius College. Her research interests lie in connections between cinema and philosophy, with a particular focus on the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis. She is the author of Cinema and Contact: the Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis.
Blake Gutt, a second-year PhD student in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, who co-organised this year’s Cambridge French Graduate Conference, said:
“The wide theme of ‘stains’ allows researchers to examine the ways in which French literature and culture engages with the material world, taking on the idea of the ‘stain’ in its multiple possible meanings, including dirt, ink, bloodstains, sin, guilt and more. We have been lucky enough this year to secure two fantastic keynote speakers in Pierre Bayard and Laura McMahon, and I’m sure this will be a fascinating and engaging Conference”.
The Cambridge French Graduate Conference will be held on 27 and 28 May at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.
The Conference is currently accepting submissions, in English or French, on the theme of “stains”. Abstracts not exceeding 250 words should be sent to stainsconference2016@gmail.com by 15 February.
For more information, contact stainsconference2016@gmail.com, visit http://stainsconference.wordpress.com, or follow the conference on Twitter @stains_taches.
