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School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

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/
Office Hours: Advice and Feedback Hours: Thursday 12pm-1pm, Friday 11am-12pm (or via appointment, in person or via Teams)

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 Franco-Maghrebian authors. Before joining Queen Mary in 2020, 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 new book series Mobilizing Memories, published by 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.

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 teach across Modern Languages & Cultures and Comparative Literature, and I am the theme lead for 'Language and Culture' for the Liberal Arts programme. I became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2022.

 

Semester 1

SML6052/COM6052 Afropean Identities: Convenor

FRE4041/FRE5041 Postcolonial Francospheres: Covenor

 

Previously taught

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:

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
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