Rosalind Silvester

I have research interests in contemporary literature and migratory studies, most notably concerning francophone-Chinese writing, art, installations and film.  In 2010 I co-organised an international colloquium, Traits chinois, lignes francophones, whose keynote speaker was the Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian and which has led to an edited volume, containing two authored chapters (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2012).  I have published articles on Ying Chen, François Cheng and Dai Sijie and have co-edited Transnational/Transartistic Journeys, a special issue of the Irish Journal of French Studies (2015). Part of my research is interdisciplinary, combining text and image studies, philosophy and film criticism, applying theories from the Education Sciences to literature, and investigating intermediality. I am currently working on a monograph, Ying Chen’s fiction: An Aesthetics of Non-Belonging, due to be published in 2020 by Legenda, Oxford. 

As well as language teaching, at undergraduate level I offer the mini-modules 'Francophone Drama' (L1), focusing on Eugene Ionesco, and ‘Les revenantes’ (L2) which studies the social, cultural and ideological manifestations of doubles and revenants in two francophone works. I also teach two Optional Modules: ‘Myth and Biography’ (L2) examines the autofiction produced by Pierre Michon, Patrick Modiano, Annie Ernaux and Michel Tournier; ‘Contemporary Francophone Chinese Fiction’ (L3) explores the themes of migration, identity and minority literature in a range of genres. 

At postgraduate level, I convened the MA Languages for 6 years and was regularly involved in teaching on four of its modules. Currently, I am the convenor of the MRes Arts and Humanities and supervise one MRes student (who is researching into Sartrean existentialism and the short stories of Louis Borges). In the past I have supervised Masters dissertations on Annie Ernaux, Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. I have also supervised an MPhil on interwar French literature and PhD theses on Haitian Women's Writing and Multimodality in French Women's Life Narratives.