French at Westminster enjoys a wide variety of research specialisms and interests, covering history, migration, ethnography, visual and digital culture and linguistics.
We invite doctoral research proposals in the field of modern and contemporary French and Francophone studies. We particularly welcome proposals that fit within (or interface with) our core research areas, including:
- Memory and legacies of empire in France and in comparative European perspectives, including the history of immigration, race, anti-racism and nationalism
- Sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, language variation and change, language contact, language policy and planning, language obsolescence, and documentation and description of endangered languages in contact with French
- Digital literatures and representation in French, web archiving and curation, social semiotics and multimodality, translation and translanguaging, Bourdieusian thought, French and Francophone diasporas and identities, the French community in London
Current and recent PhD projects
- Silence, Exile and the Problem of Postcolonial Identity in North African Francophone Literature
- 'Poétique de la Mémoire: trace, masque, palimpseste, chaos dans les oeuvres romanesques de Nabile Farès, Juan Rulfo, Daniel Maximin and Salman Rushdie' (co-supervised with the University of Grenoble)
- La production littéraire camerounaise: théâtre, roman, cinéma
- Symbols and Worlds: A study of the sacred in a selection of works by Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Salman Rushdie
- Geo/Graphies of Loss: space, place and spatial loss in North African and Canadian Writing in French
- The French Community in London On-Land and On-Line: an ethnosemiotic analysis
- Fashioning Identities and Performing Transnational ‘Imaginaries’: fashion practices as diasporic spaces among the young Congolese community in London