My thesis, ‘Writing Home: Haiti and Vietnam in the Autofiction of Dany Laferrière and Anna Moï’, examines the return narratives of two writers: Dany Laferrière, who writes about returning to Haiti following exile; and Anna Moï, who depicts the search for a permanent place to live in Vietnam, also after a long (two decades) absence.I examine the depictions of Haiti and Vietnam, in which ‘home’ is depicted through a collection of different desires, experiences and gazes that are in friction with each other: the nostalgic desire for the past home; the traumatic experience of departure; the critical gaze that results from the experience of exile. These writers’ autofictions, which have to date never been closely compared against each other, go beyond resolving the differences between the past and present. Looking at what it means to make a home for oneself, they call for a closer, continuous re-engagement with their changing home space, thereby resisting fixed, reified images of the homeland.Thanks to ADEFFI’s bourse doctorale, generously sponsored by AMOPA, I was able to conduct a two-week research visit to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and access materials on, and by, Laferrière and Moï for my project. I visited the BNF in October 2024 to complete my readings of secondary literature on project. This included scholarship on Moï and Vietnamese writing (an understudied area), published in France, as well as wider scholarship on postcolonial writing and Caribbean writing. Most notably, I was able to make use of the BNF’s audiovisual collection and access a large range of interviews and films that expanded my research on the writers’ own relationships to their homeland.
Bourse doctorale: lauréate 2024
Maika Nguyen, University College Dublin
Bourse doctorale: lauréate 2023
Lucille Raynal, University College Dublin
Which space(s) do eighteenth-century French women do occupy? Since the nineteenth century, women were traditionally assigned to the domestic space. My thesis explores the space of sixwomen (the scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the actress Mademoiselle Clairon, the crownprincess Isabelle de Bourbon-Parme, the portraitist Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Lucy deLa Tour du Pin – lady-in-waiting, farmer, and educator – and the linen seller Marie-VictoireMonnard) who were juggling between their “traditional” career – in other words, being awoman, a wife, and a mother – and their professional one. Through the analysis of theircorrespondences and memoirs, as well as the visual production of several female painters, mythesis explores how these women assert their position within the professional space, theybreak bounds, rethinking the link between gender and space.Thanks to the support of the ADEFFI’s bourse doctorale, sponsored by AMOPA, I conductedarchival research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (between François-Mitterrand andArsenal) to complete my research, expand my bibliography and transcribe Eighteenth-centurymanuscripts. I was also able to visit the Louvre to explore the visual production of Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
Supervisor: Dr Síofra Pierse
What can Samuel Beckett’s drama tell us about being human in the Anthropocene? Beckett’s turn to the theatre after the Second World War, and later to other technological media such as radio and television, was clearly motivated by the need to rethink the human in relation to both physical and virtual environments and the non-human elements populating these spaces. As the interrelated crises of the human and the environment continue to intensify, Beckett’s twentieth-century plays have become a powerful legacy to address some of the most concerning challenges of the twenty-first century through a creative lens.
My doctoral research investigates the interactions between the human, technology and the environment in Beckett’s bilingual (French and English) dramatic œuvre through an interdisciplinary methodology that combines literary criticism and performance theory, together with philosophy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience. Through an analysis of the stimulus-response units that appear in most of the plays, my thesis seeks to unearth Beckett’s aesthetic of stimulation, and demonstrates that this dramaturgical strategy performs a vital focal shift from the human in isolation to the nexus human-technology-environment in modern drama. Additionally, performance analysis of adaptations in French, English and German traces how practitioners have dealt with this sensorial aesthetic and how they keep the Beckettian ecosystem relevant to the posthuman condition.
Thanks to the support of the ADEFFI’s bourse doctorale, generously sponsored by AMOPA, I will conduct archival research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Association de la Régie Théatrale to investigate the production of Beckett’s Comédie (1964) by French director Jean-Marie Serreau at the Pavillon de Marsan in 1964 and at the Odéon – Théâtre de France in 1966.
Supervisor: Prof Nicholas Johnson
Bourse doctorale: lauréate 2022
Céline Thobois, Trinity College Dublin
Bourse doctorale: lauréate 2021
Helen McKelvey, Queen's University Belfast
My doctoral project, ‘Religious Imagery in Nineteenth-Century French Slavery Narratives’, uses a rich critical framework of historiography, colonial studies, critical race theory, gender studies, theology and literary analysis to examine the multifaceted ways in which tropes and narratives of religion are used to represent slavery in nineteenth-century French literature. Focussing on writing produced predominantly in the 1820s and 1830s, my analysis of a multi-generic corpus (spanning prose, poetry, short stories, print media and archival writings) reveals the extent to which religion played a key and understudied role in the nineteenth-century French imagination of slavery. I also assert that the nineteenth century’s tendency to represent slavery through the lens of religion has unmistakable echoes in writing about the historic slave trade in the twenty-first century. The thesis therefore fills an important lacuna in the field and seeks to redress the marginalisation of the intersection of religion and literature in Francophone post/colonial studies more generally. By reassessing the role of religion in writing about slavery and the slave trade, we expand our understanding of, and challenge our (mis)conceptions about, historical slavery, its perpetrators, victims, and opponents.
An important aspect of my doctoral project has been the comparison of literary sources with archival sources. The ADEFFI Bourse Doctorale, sponsored by AMOPA, will allow me to undertake a period of archival research in Paris and to examine further the presence of black women within French convents in the nineteenth century. Accessing these archives will allow a more thorough investigation of the experiences of black women within the cloisters, as well as considering, for the first time, those who helped these black women find freedom, and their fellow nuns’ perceptions of them. Using archives comparatively to underscore the development of and inspiration for fictional texts, I will develop my analysis of how this element of religious discourse defines and shapes writing about slavery in the nineteenth century. This will be crucial to developing my research beyond the thesis into publication.
Supervisor: Dr Steven Wilson, with Prof. Maeve McCusker
My doctoral thesis examines the morphosyntax of a subclass of pronouns (clitics) in Old French. I am interested in their position with regards to infinitives, a context that remains under-documented. We observe a series of differences with other Romance languages: for instance, Spanish and Italian have the order infinitive-clitic, whereas Modern French shows clitic-infinitive. Assuming that clitics appeared during the common Proto-Romance stage, I seek to situate in time when French branched off from the Spanish/Italian ordering. More generally, I look into how clitic placement evolved in French from the earliest records we have.
Supervisors: Dr Christina Sevdali and Prof Raffaella Folli
Bourse doctorale: lauréat 2020
Marc Olivier-Loiseau, Ulster University
Bourse doctorale: lauréate 2019
Emma Dunne, UCD
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My thesis considers the key eighteenth-century theme of happiness in Isabelle de Charrière’s complete works, examining her idiosyncratic vision of, and approach to, happiness, through analysis of her novels, plays, and personal correspondence. Specifically, my thesis addresses the pursuit of happiness in Charrière's writings, focusing on obstacles encountered in its pursuit, such as marriage, societal conventions, and the French Revolution and its related exile, while also addressing the many opportunities for happiness as elucidated in her works, notably through friendship, writing, and musical endeavours. While my thesis reveals Charrière's perspectives on happiness, it also serves to situate Charrière and her ideas on happiness within the wider debates on happiness in the eighteenth-century French narrative.
Supervisor: Dr Siofra Pierse