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Dr Rebekah Vince, Ph.D. M.Res

Rebekah

Lecturer in French, HEA Fellow

Email: r.vince@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Arts One, Room 1.03
Website: https://movingmemoriestravellingtongues.wordpress.com/

Profile

I am a memory studies scholar specialising in French postmemory narratives, francophone postcolonial studies, and the Mediterranean francosphère. In 2018, I received a Wolfson-funded PhD from the University of Warwick, focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as depicted in literary texts by francophone North African authors. My monograph, tentatively entitled Unsettled Memories: Franco-Maghrebi Literature on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, is under contract with Liverpool University Press.

I came to Queen Mary University of London as Lecturer in French in 2020 and I am currently on research sabbatical as a Visiting Scholar at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, where I am focusing on Etty Hillesum, a Dutch diarist of WWII in postcolonial perspective, through the lens of French-Algerian author Karima Berger. Before joining Queen Mary, I was an Early Career Fellow at Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study and a Teaching Fellow in French at Durham University. I was also a Visiting Scholar at the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative, Ghent University (Belgium) in 2017 and a Visiting Fellow at St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge in 2019. 

My research moves at the intersection between postcolonial studies, Jewish studies, and transnational French studies, engaging with dialogic approaches to memory. I am editor of the bilingual journal Francosphères and co-editor (with Hanna Teichler) of the book series Mobilizing Memories, published by De Gruyter Brill. The essay ‘Music of the Francospheres’ was jointly awarded the 75th anniversary French Studies essay prize on the future of French Studies, alongside Sura Qadiri’s essay ‘The Future is in the Making’. My recent work has introduced the concept of inter-doubt dialogue and I am currently exploring what I call ‘reharmonisations’ of French canonical literature, such as Baudelaire Jazz by Patrick Chamoiseau (see Postcolonial Francospheres: Reharmonising the French Canon | University of London).

Rebekah Vince (0000-0001-7530-324X) - ORCID

Teaching

My research into transcultural memory studies informs my teaching philosophy, which emphasises translation as a form of migration and a way of constructing dialogue with the past in post-colonial perspective. This involves engagement with contrapuntal reading, postcolonial theory, and decolonial thinking, while seeking to balance domestication and foreignisation in translation.

I am currently on research sabbatical but otherwise teach across Modern Languages & Cultures and Comparative Literature, while serving as theme lead for 'Language and Culture' for the Liberal Arts programme. I became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2022.

Previously taught

SML6052/COM6052 Afropean Identities: Convenor

FRE4041/FRE5041 Postcolonial Francospheres: Covenor

SML4006 Culture and Language Block 3 (Gender, Race, Class, Religion, Postcolonialism)

SML 5045/COM5045 Race and Racism in European Culture Block 2 (Enlightenment, Colonialism, Assimilation)

FRE6204 French III Translation (French to English)

Research

Research Interests:

  • Transcultural memory studies
  • Francophone postcolonial studies
  • World literature and translation
  • French postmemory narratives
  • North African literature in French
  • Jewish-Muslim interactions
  • Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Examples of research funding:

2023-2025 ‒ British Institute for Libyan & North African Studies (BILNAS) flagship research scheme grant for project 'Memory as Inheritance: Transgenerational Maghribi Jewish Heritage across the Mediterranean Francosphere'

2021 ‒ French Embassy postdoctoral fellowship for 'Troubled Memories' project

2020-2022 ‒ British Academy research grant for 'Contested Returns' joint project (P-I with Co-Is Toufic Haddad, CBRL-Jerusalem and Anna Toufic, UCL)

Publications

Co-Edited Volume

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

  • [with Rebecca Infield] ‘Jewish Culture in 21st Century France’, in Aurelien Mondon, Marion Demossier, Nina Parish, David Lees (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture (Routledge, 2019), pp. 257‒67
  • ‘Pulled in All Directions: the Shoah, Colonialism and Exile in Valérie Zenatti’s Jacob, Jacob’, in Dirk Göttsche (ed.), Memory and Postcolonial Studies: Synergies and New Directions (Peter Lang, 2019), pp. 235‒53

Interviews

Poetry

Supervision

I welcome expressions of interest from candidates seeking to undertake doctoral research in the following areas:

  • Francophone North African literature
  • French postmemory narratives
  • Jewish-Muslim interactions in France
  • Intersections between French and Dutch texts on WWII and colonialism
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