French Studies offers a range of research programs encompassing the study of French and Francophone literature, cinema, history and society. The French language is one of the most widely spoken European languages, while French culture pervades many aspects of daily life. Knowledge of French is a powerful instrument for opening up the wealth of Frenchspeaking cultural groups and for understanding human society more generally.
Academic staff have a wide range of expertise including areas in Medieval French, Literature in French from Africa, the Caribbean, Switzerland and Canada; contemporary French society; French cinema; French syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; French literary theory; and French-speaking cultures other than France.
Postgraduate research students work on a wide range of topics. See the departmental webpage.
The following research projects of staff have been funded by the ARC:
Communications and National Identity in Early Modern France
The project seeks understanding of the survival of particularist ideas about the 'French people' and France within the universalist context of Enlightenment thought.
Through a range of methodologies of discours analysis, it attempts to demonstrate how representations of national character were already being disseminated, as today, in a broad range of literary philosophical and political texts.
The project places the growth of national identity in the context of the communications structures of the time and of the range of available media, investigating the ways in which an ever broader spectrum of information channels affected the evolution of French national life.
The Baudin Legacy: A New History of the French Scientific Voyage to Australia (1800-1804)
The expedition of Captain Nicolas Baudin, commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte, made an exceptional contribution to the natural sciences, cartography and anthropology concerning the Southern Lands. The importance of the Baudin Expedition in the history of early European contact with Australia and its place in French/Australian history is yet to be fully acknowledged.
The primary aim of the project is to provide an online archive and reference guide. The project will present French transcriptions and English translations, with annotations and analysis, of the writings generated by the expedition: the journals of Baudin, his officers, scientists and crew, as well as other documents previously difficult to access. This material will form the basis for an analytical reappraisal of many aspects of the expedition by the researchers involved in the project, as well as a focus for continuing work on the expedition by other scholars. |
