French cinema; multilingualism; contemporary French culture and society; museum studies; European cinema studies; migration and movement in the contemporary world; language, power and violence in film; postcolonialism and cultural representation; codeswitching and audiovisual translation; transnational and Francophone film studies

I joined the ANU in 2016, after completing my PhD as a cotutelle at the University of Melbourne and l'Université Sorbonne Nouvelle- Paris 3 in 2015. My research explores language, culture, violence, and power in French and Francophone contexts. Specifically, I work on the representation of linguistic and cultural difference in French film, focusing on the relationship between multilingualism and social power. I am particularly interested in films which portray marginalised cultures and the potential of languages other than French, even the historically disenfranchised, to empower their speakers. I also research the interplay between power and violence in cinema more broadly, and the representation of multiculturalism in French museums.

I am Convenor of the ANU French Research Cluster and Postgraduate Officer of the Australian Society for French Studies. I taught across French, English, and Cinema studies at the University of Melbourne, Paris 3, and the Université Paris-Est Créteil before joining the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU, and my book Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema will be published with Manchester University Press in September 2017.

Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester University Press 2017)

This monograph investigates the contemporary phenomenon of multilingualism in French film, and asks what such films can tell us about the experience of speaking different languages in today's France. Not only is multilingual dialogue vastly more present in twenty-first-century French cinema, but for practically the first time, multilingualism is being depicted as a tool for (re)negotiating power dynamics. In multilingual cinema, the depiction of the status of a wide range of languages other than French is evolving from marginalised to foregrounded. Through language learning and strategic code-switching, the characters of these films wrest power from one another and wield it in innovative ways. Exploiting their knowledge of a wide range of languages, from rival lingua francas like English to traditionally migrant or socio-politically marginalised languages such as Arabic or Kurdish, multilingual characters in these films offer a counter-perspective to dominating ideologies of the role and status of the French language.

Decentring France adopts a transnational approach to understandings of social power and language. It analyses multilingual film through the framework of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s theory of polycentric multiculturalism, which “is about dispersing power, about empowering the disempowered, about transforming subordinating institutions and discourses” (Unthinking Eurocentrism 1994, 48). Unpacking the power dynamics at play in the translingual dialogue of eight emblematic case studies (Entre les murs [Laurent Cantet 2008], Polisse [Maïwenn 2011], Un prophète [Jacques Audiard 2009], Dheepan [Jacques Audiard 2015], Welcome [Philippe Lioret 2009], La Graine et le mulet [Abdellatif Kechiche 2007], Des hommes et des dieux [Xavier Beauvois 2010] and London River [Rachid Bouchareb 2009]), it posits that contemporary French multilingual films revisit and revise the role of language in French cinema. 

New project: the cinema of Jacques Audiard

Jacques Audiard, under contract with Manchester University Press, French Film Directors series

Spanning traditional French milieus and experimental transnational spaces, as concerned with intimacy and empowerment as with violence and subjugation, the work of Jacques Audiard is a key part of contemporary French cinema. Audiard is a significant filmmaker in France not only due to his success in the box office and on the awards circuit, but because he occupies a place in the heart of the French cinematic landscape while also making films that tests its edges. Perhaps more than any other French filmmaker working today, Audiard toes the line between centre and periphery, France and beyond.

Jacques Audiard, to be published within MUP's French Film Directors series, will be the first book to examine Audiard’s career, the delicate position he occupies between national French and transnational cinemas, and the ways in which his films cross cultural, social, linguistic and geographic borders to challenge the conventions of French cinema. The book will build its methodological frame from a blending of French cinema studies, particularly on the contested concept of the auteur, and transnational cinema studies. Blending ‘micro’ textual analysis with ‘macro’ cinema history, it will reveal the centrality of movement to Audiard’s cinema, from physical violence to alternative mobilities, flows of globalisation, acts of creative expression, sex and the social ascent of the underdog. Through analysis of his individual films within the context of his global body of work, this book will argue that Jacques Audiard’s films, characters and career are uniquely and fundamentally defined by boundary-breaking, border-crossing and myriad forms of movement in the contemporary world.

Other current and future projects:

Language, power and violence in the cinema of Denis Villeneuve

La langue de passage

Paris museum cultures and representations of multiculturalism

Publications in press:

‘Contemporary French cinema and the langue de passage: from Dheepan to Welcome’, French Cultural Studies, vol. 29:1, 2018.

With Natalie Edwards and Chris Hogarth, ‘Introduction: migrations across media’, French Cultural Studies, 29:1, 2018.

‘No laughing matter? Navigating political (in)correctness in Intouchables’, Francosphères, vol. 6:1, 2018.

‘Merry Christmas in no man’s land: European borders, language barriers and front lines in Christian Carion’s Joyeux Noël’, M. Gott and T. Schilt (eds), Cinéma-monde: Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

‘Multilingual pilgrimages: language and trans-Mediterranean cultural identity in Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Le Grand Voyage’, C. Launchbury and M. MacDonald (eds), Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s): Trans-Mediterranean Francophonies, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019.

‘Transnational French cinema and the multilingual film’, C. Forsdick and C. Launchbury (eds), Transnational French Studies, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019.

I am available to supervise PhD, Masters and Honours students in any of my fields of expertise.