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• BA
• MA (Critical Theory)
• DPhil (French Studies)
• FHEA, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

My BA was in Modern Languages (French and German) at St John's College, Oxford, which I followed with an MA in Critical Theory and DPhil in French Studies at the University of Sussex. I then worked as a lectrice (colloquial assistant of English) for two years in France (Dijon and Paris) before being appointed to a lecturership in French at Birmingham, in 1990. I was made Reader in French Film and Gender Studies in 2006, and Professor of French and Visual Studies in 2020.

Having organized the French cinema curriculum for Birmingham’s Department of French Studies for many years until 2011, I then (in the Department of Modern Languages) convened and taught (on) optional modules called Behind the Camera: women’s cinema from the 1960s to the present; Artists’ Film and Video; Introduction to European Film; Cross-Cultural Cinema: Migration and Displacement, and Ethics, Politics, Race and Sexuality in Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema. I have also taught on the core modules of Modern Languages’s MA in Global Comparative Literatures and Critical Theories, on the Sexuality, Gender and Representation module of the MRes Sexuality and Gender Studies, and on Core modules I, II and V of the BA Modern Languages (French).

I have supervised or co-supervised nine PhDs, two MAs by Research (40,000 word thesis) and numerous shorter Masters theses/dissertations to completion, on a range of topics in twentieth and twenty-first film, literary and theatre studies. As I move to Professor Emerita status in January 2025 I am still second supervising one PhD on French film (‘Anachronistic Heroes in French comedy cinema’), but am no longer allowed to lead-supervise new doctoral students!

Find out more - our PhD French Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡.

My latest book The Cinema of Mia Hansen-Løve: candour and vulnerability was published in Edinburgh University Press’s ‘Visionaries’ series on women film-makers in February 2021. This followed The Body and the Screen, on female subjectivities in the films of French and British women directors, which appeared in Bloomsbury’s ‘Thinking Cinema’ series in January 2017 and won BAFTSS Best Monograph award for that year. I was PI of the AHRC network ‘Serge Daney and queer cinephilia’ from July 2018 to June 2021, with Professor Marc Siegel of the University of Mainz, Germany as Co-Investigator, and Dr Pierre Eugene of the Université d’Amiens as third project team member; a collection of essays arising from this network project was published by Meson Press early in 2024.

I am a General Editor of French Screen Studies (formerly Studies in French Cinema), and co-convene the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Special Interest Group on French and Francophone Screen Studies. I am also a member of BAFTSS, of the European Network for Cinema Studies (NECS) and of the Women’s Film and Television History Network (WFTHN). I regularly attend the conferences of these associations and have done public engagement talks for Birmingham’s IKON gallery and the Mockingbird cinema at Birmingham’s Custard Factory.