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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
French MA, MPhil, PhD
This is a research programme within the French subject area.
Key facts
- Subject area: French
- Location: Canterbury (with an optional year in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure)
- School: School of European Culture and Languages
- Duration: MA one year full-time or two years part-time; MPhil two years full-time or three years part-time; PhD registration three to four years full-time or five to six years part-time.
- Start: September.
- Fees: More info
- Entry requirements: A first or upper-second class honours degree in a relevant subject (or equivalent) and the appropriate language skills. Please also check our general entry requirements (including English language requirements).
Outline
Students may study for the degrees of MA, M.Phil and PhD in French studies.
Programme structure
For further information see the School site.
Funding
Every school at Kent offers one or two University postgraduate research scholarships, each available for three years, providing fees at the home/EU rate and a stipend up to £13,590 per annum (2011/12 rate).
Many schools offer scholarships in the form of Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) whereby postgraduate research students receive financial support in return for teaching. The value of awards may vary, but often cover tuition fees at the home/EU rate and a substantial maintenance grant.
All postgraduate research students are eligible to apply for GTAs. See Graduate Teaching Assistantships.
The School of European Culture and Languages offers a number of Graduate Teaching Assistantships every year. These are available to UK, EU and international students and consist of an annual maintenance stipend of £7,788.
As a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Block Grant Partnership, the School of European Culture and Languages offers AHRC postgraduate studentships in the field of European Culture and Languages (either for a taught MA or for a PhD). The School also offers a number of postgraduate scholarships for research students each year; students holding these awards are expected to contribute to their subject area by doing up to six hours of teaching per week.
Studentships and scholarships are advertised in January for a September start.
Students applying for a place on any one of the University of Kent at Paris MA programmes may also apply for an award from the Paris Scholarship fund, currently valued at over £5,000. For further information see: University of Kent at Paris scholarships.
Vacancies exist for language assistants in French, Spanish, Italian and German. These generally involve around ten hours of teaching per week for which there is an hourly payment; assistants also receive a 50% contribution towards the fees for one of our taught MA programmes. Assistantships are advertised in January for a September start.
The School also provides funds for research students to attend conferences, as well as for inter-library loans and minor expenses related to research.
For further details of postgraduate funding, see Postgraduate funding.
Also see the following web-pages:
View further information about scholarships available in the School of European Culture and Languages.
Further information:
Resources and facilities
The Templeman Library has excellent holdings in all areas relevant to our research, with particular strengths in 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st-century French literature. The School of European Culture and Languages provides high-quality IT facilities, including state-of-the-art media laboratories, dedicated technical staff and designated areas for postgraduate study. Other facilities include all-purpose teaching rooms, two networked multimedia laboratories and a streamed film library, as well as access to satellite TV channels.
Further information:
Research areas
French at the University of Kent gives priority to high-quality research in fields ranging from 18th-century French literature and thought to contemporary francophone writing and sociolinguistics. Sustainable development of research strengths is ensured by grouping related projects into networks. These consolidate a sense of common purpose and identity and are an essential part of a research environment designed to foster and support individual and collaborative initiatives. Researchers in French at the University of Kent are grouped in the following networks.
Word and Image Studies
This is a rapidly expanding research network. Peter Read came to Kent with an extensive list of interdisciplinary publications, notably on the interplay between art and literature. His recent publications include The Cubist Painters, Apollinaire and Cubism (2004); Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory (2008); Les Dessins de Guillaume Apollinaire (2008). He has also co-edited Giacometti: Critical Essays (2009) and Guillaume Apollinaire: Correspondance avec les artistes (2009).
Thomas Baldwin recently authored The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust, which explores ekphrastic variations in the writings of Proust, and his forthcoming monograph extends this critical approach to encompass 18th-, 19thand 20th-century authors. His new book, entitled The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust and Deleuze, will be available in 2011.
Research by Thomas Baldwin and Peter Read overlaps with that of Jon Kear, an art historian at the University of Kent, who works on modern French art, literature and film. Jon Kear is a leading authority on the work of French film director Chris Marker. He and Peter Read have also both recently published essays exploring the importance of Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu to works by Cézanne and Picasso. Jon Kear's most recent book, Impressionism, was published in 2008.
This aspect of research in Kent is further strengthened by Alex Hughes's wide-ranging work on 20th-century French literature, photography and cinema.
Philosophy and Critical Theory
Lorenzo Chiesa works on French critical theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy and has published books and essays on Artaud, Badiou, Foucault and Lacan, and in 2007 published Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading. Shane Weller's publications include books on Beckett, French literature and ethics, and nihilism. James Fowler is a leading 18th-century scholar having just published a major work on The Libertine's Nemesis: The Figure of the Prude in Crébillon fils, Richardson, Laclos and Sade (2010). His research thus matches related preoccupations in the work of Thomas Baldwin, Lorenzo Chiesa and Shane Weller, who together constitute a strong research cluster in the field of French philosophy and critical theory.
Gender Studies
Ana de Medeiros, like Alex Hughes, works in modern gender studies, and has increasingly focused on francophone writing publishing several pieces on Assia Djebar including an interview with the author as well as writing articles on other 21st century texts by women writers including Marie Nimier. These fields have proved attractive to postgraduates. James Fowler's work on the literary presentation of female prudes and libertines also contributes to Gender Studies.
Cultural Memory
Alex Hughes, Ana de Medeiros and Peter Read all have publications in the field of Cultural Memory and this area of research is further enriched by the School's Cultural Memory Research Project and the major international conference on that subject which was hosted by the University of Kent in 2008.
Centre for Language and Linguistic Studies (CLLS)
Founded in 2007, the Centre aims to promote interdisciplinary collaboration in linguistic research and teaching. Membership includes not just linguists within SECL but also researchers in classics, philosophy, computing, psychology and anthropology, reflecting the many and varied routes by which individuals come to a love of language and the various disciplines and sub-disciplines of linguistics. Kent provides academic progression in linguistics from undergraduate to graduate levels (taught and research MA, MPhil and PhD) with CLLS offering supervision and support in areas such as syntax, semantics and pragmatics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and stylistics. We run lectures, symposiums and workshops with experts from Kent and far beyond and have recently held the third of a series of biennial international conferences devoted to Interfaces in Language, with published proceedings.
Show all
|Staff research
Dr Thomas Baldwin: (French) Director of MA in Modern French Studies
Nineteenth- and 20th-century French literature; representations of art in literature; literary theory and philosophy.
Dr Lorenzo Chiesa: (French) Reader
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; 20thcentury French philosophy; Contemporary Italian critical theory.
Dr Larry Duffy: (French) Lecturer
Nineteenth-century French literature, thought and culture; Flaubert, Zola; realism, naturalism and documentary literature; the body.
Dr James Fowler: (French) Head of French
Novels, drama and other writings of the 18th century; Diderot and the Enlightenment; prudes and their relation to libertinage; narratology; psychoanalysis; discourses of the body; Richardson's reception in France.
Dr David Hornsby: (Linguistics) Senior Lecturer
Sociolinguistic theory; the history of the French language.
Professor Alex Hughes: (French) Pro-Vice Chancellor
Franco-Sino relations; gender studies; autobiography and photography.
Dr Ben Hutchinson: (German) Director of MA in Modern German and Comparative Literature; Co-director of the Centre for Modern European Literature
Nineteenth- and 20th-century German and European literature; Rilke, Sebald, Jean Améry, Kafka, Thomas Bernhard; 20th-century poetry; modernism; comparative poetics.
Dr Jon Kear: (History & Philosophy of Art) Lecturer
Nineteenth-century French painting, sculpture and printmaking; French cinema.
Dr Antonio Lázaro-Reboll: (Hispanic Studies) Head of Hispanic Studies; Director of Postgraduate Studies
Cultural studies; film studies; reception studies; visual culture, in particular art-horror in Spanish visual culture.
Dr Ana de Medeiros: (French) Senior Lecturer
Francophone and Lusophone women authors, in particular Marguerite Yourcenar, Assia Djebar and Annie Ernaux; autobiography and postcolonial studies.
Dr Lucy E O'Meara: (French) Lecturer
Literary and cultural theory; aesthetics; Roland Barthes.
Professor Peter Read: (French) Academic Director of the University of Kent, Paris
Nineteenth- and 20th-century French literature and the visual arts; Apollinaire; Surrealism.
Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner: (Comparative Literature) Co-director of the Centre for Modern European Literature
Avant-garde and neo-avant-garde literature, art, film and theory; digital poetry; European and American cinema; modernism and postmodernism.
Dr Axel Stähler: (Comparative Literature) Senior Lecturer
Jewish literature and culture; early modern festival culture; the 18th-century novel in Europe; intermediality and ‘iconarratology'; postcolonial literature and theory; fundamentalism and literature.
Dr Shane Weller: (Comparative Literature) Director of Postgraduate Studies in Comparative Literature
European modernism, postmodernism, and literary theory; literature and philosophy.
Further information:
Contact details
Admissions enquiriesT: +44 (0)1227 827272
E: information@kent.ac.uk
Professor Peter Read
Department of French School of European Culture and Languages,
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NF, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 827410
E: p.f.read@kent.ac.uk
Centre for English and World Languages
T: +44 (0)1227 824069
E: premasters@kent.ac.uk
W: www.kent.ac.uk/cewl/courses/GraduateDiplomas
Further information: