University of Limerick

Faculty Member, Department of French Studies, MIC

Lecturer

Thesis Title: Metropolitan Motion: French Travel Writing in London and New York, 1851-2000

About

My work brings French Studies into dialogue with Urban Studies.

My current research project looks at Paris as a transnational space, in order to examine how contemporary representations of cultural identity reposition the significances of public space.
Communication spaces and physical articulations in space form two strands for approaching how the architectures and ideologies of Parisian public places are reconfigured . Drawing on a variety of literature, film and other representational practices such as graffiti, rap and parkour, I examine identity-making in relation to language difference, register, and communication and, secondly, physical mobilities that inhabit the spaces of the French capital. These themes are linked respectively by an understanding of architecture as a coded enterprise that directs meaning by spatially empirical means, and whose meanings are constantly reiterated and reinvented through communication and physical agency. 
The first section of the project looks at the linguistic landscape of the capital, and the politics of how linguistic identities are positioned or position themselves within the urban environment. The analysis places 'postcolonial' and 'cosmopolitan' identities in dialogue. Appropriating these theoretical strands, on the one hand, I wish to examine the linguistic identities of transnational communities in Paris and moments of interchange and interpretation. On the other hand, I am interested in the spatial politics of linguistic 'cosmopolitanism', understood in a grounded, or necessary, sense as well as in the sense of a privileged and professional elite. Examining how the mutual partaking in public space brings into dialogue these two distinct identities problematises notions of the centre and the peripherary as discrete communities. It is in this sense that the complex notion of 'urbanities', borrowed from urban theory as a means of re-thinking architecture as an interpretive, mobile arena proves a useful theoretical mode of analysis.
Currently, I am building a corpus, and have settled on some key authors - such as Michael Haneke and Laurent Cantet. However, I would also be very interested to hear from anyone working on a similar or related area of interest...
 

The concerns underpinning my work are two-fold:
1. On the one hand, my research looks at the appropriation of urban space in literary and cinematic texts, as well as in other 'spaces of representation' in the city. I am interested particularly in how identities are spatialised in relation to the structures of the urban environment. As such, this brings into dialogue the intentionality of architectural design and the interpretational action of the text.
2. The theoretical side of my research dialogues with postcolonial critique, cultural studies and urban theory. I am interested in how the subject matter and form of French representational practices engender moments of crisis in theoretical models. The approach treats theory as a porous entity, in conversation with the historical and spatial singularity of representations of the French urban experience. 

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