President’s Welcome 2024
Dear Australian Society for French Studies members,
As I write this annual welcome, I reflect on our Society’s many achievements over the past year. In December, our Sydney University colleagues hosted an excellent conference, ‘Body, Motion, Space’. It featured keynote addresses from French scholar David Le Breton and the Australian Journal of French Studies’ editor, Jarrod Hayes, as well as papers from scholars from around the world and a strong Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand cohort. At the conference, we celebrated the successes of our 2023 prize winners: Louise Cain, whose essay “The gaze that looks back: queering hierarchies of viewing in Portrait of a Lady on Fire” will be published in the Australian Journal of French Studies as part of the AJFS/ASFS Postgraduate Essay Prize, and Madeline Roycroft, who received the Colin Nettelbeck Prize to support travel to Europe for her PhD project, “Decentring French opera”. We encourage all HDR Postgraduates and Early Career Scholars (within five years of their PhD and not yet in a full-time teaching and research position) conducting research in French Studies to consider applying for these prizes in 2024 or beyond. We urge all supervisors to let their PhDs, MPhils and mentees know about these opportunities as well. During the conference, it was also a highlight to see how our community has adapted to new modalities. The ASFS executive and conference organising committees offered a thriving online day for those who could not travel, plus small but significant travel bursaries for those precarious ECRs and independent scholars who attended in person without institutional funding.
In the middle of the year, we paired with the DRAFT seminar series to showcase the work of ASFS Postgraduates from multiple continents in a free online symposium. We also teamed up with the Embassy of France in Australia to offer two grants to support outreach activities in our members’ communities. In 2023, we funded the club littéraire francophone reading group, a collaboration between Monash University colleagues and Melbourne-based high school teachers of French, and a series of events at the University of New England aimed at sparking interest in French among the school students of Armidale. If you have a bright idea for fostering connections between your French program and your local community, keep an eye out for this year’s application round. Likewise, our annual mentorship call will roll around soon; we encourage all who wish to share and/or receive guidance to sign up, at any career stage. For me personally, being a mentor and mentee – often both at once, and at both ‘junior’ and more advanced stages of my career – has been one of the most rewarding parts of my experience in this community.
This coming December, we are delighted to return to the city of Melbourne, ten years after our last visit when RMIT hosted the 2014 conference. This year will be hosted by The University of Melbourne, where we will explore the theme of “Global French Studies: Transnational, Transcultural, and Transdisciplinary Perspectives”. Keep an eye out for the Call for Papers soon. Finally, while the achievements of our individual members are too numerous to list, I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the wonderful news that our Immediate Past President, Professor Natalie Edwards, has been elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Congratulations, Natalie!
However, despite all this vibrant activity, our discipline and our colleagues continue to be deeply affected by disturbing cuts in universities in our region and beyond. After a stellar 2022 conference hosted by our French Studies colleagues at the Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, we were aggrieved to learn of the university’s plans to close multiple languages, and to reduce French to a teaching-only program. We watch the situation at Macquarie University closely as they move to close several languages other than French. And further afield, we are deeply concerned about the cuts to language and other – mostly humanities – programs in the UK, first at Aberdeen University and as of very recently, at the University of Kent.
The ASFS continues to stand with our colleagues and for our discipline, and we encourage any members to reach out to us if we can be of assistance to you. I make this offer not only in relation to broader threats to our discipline, but to any way the Society can support our members, morally or materially. The Australian Society for French Studies is made and led by French Studies academics of all career paths and stages, and the Society’s goal is to serve them all. If there is a form of support you would like to see from the ASFS, my inbox is always open: gemma.king@anu.edu.au.
I leave you thus with a bittersweet mix of celebration, trepidation and – especially – solidarity.
Bien à vous,
Gemma King
ASFS President