Warwick Seminar for Interdisciplinary French Studies: upcoming events in 2025-26
Seminars will take place either online, on Microsoft Teams, or in the Warwick Faculty of Arts Building, unless otherwise stated. All are welcome to both the online and in-person events. To access the online events please click on the Teams link for the relevant seminar, displayed below. We recommend you download the (free) Teams app for ease of access. Please email the convenor, Philippe Le Goff, at P dot Le-Goff at warwick dot ac dot uk, with any questions.
Recordings of selected papers from 2022-3 can be found here, those from 2021-2 can be accessed here and those from 2020-1 here.
Wednesday 15 October: Kate Astbury (Warwick): 'Napoleon, theatre and the Hundred Days'
Napoleon’s return to power in 1815 is somewhat of an academic anomaly in the history of theatre. Scholars of theatre during the Empire usually stop in 1814, those working on the Restoration tend to skip over the Hundred Days. I’d like to argue that it is a unique space in which we can see more visibly the complex interplay of art and politics that characterises Napoleonic theatre. During those few weeks in 1815, theatres in Paris and the provinces brought back onto stage some of the hits of the Empire which means that the Hundred Days can be usefully used as a microcosm of the period as a whole. This will be a work-in-progress seminar to give some examples of how plays performed during Napoleon’s return to power can serve to highlight the key aesthetic concerns of the theatrical scene between 1799 and 1815 while also outlining some of the methodological challenges of the research. I’ll be touching upon issues surrounding interdisciplinarity, gaps in the archives, qualitative and quantitative research, the reliability of data, and the difficulties of maintaining extended metaphors, so come along and find out what thorny problems I’ve been grappling with!
Kate Astbury is Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick.
This event will take place in the Warwick Faculty of Arts Building, room FAB6.02, 5-6.30pm.
Wednesday 26 November: Adam Agowun (Warwick) and Airelle Amédro (Warwick)
Adam Agowun: '''Quel combustible ?'' Understanding image projection in the Fifth Republic and the role of personas in Nicolas Sarkozy’s political communication strategy'
Ten years before he ascended to the presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy famously compared the media to furnaces who needed to be fuelled, and argued that providing said ‘fuel’ translated to favourable coverage. Sarkozy’s accomplishments as a charismatic and popular performer with both audiences and media professionals suggest this is largely an accurate assessment. There have been several accounts tracing Sarkozy’s style and media strategy, while some have gone as far as calling him le téléprésident (Jost and Muzet, 2011) on account of his skills.
However, there is a certain ambiguity here – what is this ‘fuel’ to which Sarkozy refers? Given changes in the media landscape at the time, which required politicians to engage in more dynamic performances and with more personal formats of programming, such as the chat show (Neveu, 2005), we might argue that Sarkozy was simply aware of the need to personalise his performances. Yet this does not account for the fact that since its inception, the presidential office has always been deeply personalised, nor for the fact that there were different televisual formats (interviews, chat shows, news bulletins inter alia) that required different kinds of performances. In this sense, is it not more appropriate to consider not ‘du combustible’, but ‘des combustibles’?
In this paper, I will therefore argue that we can consider French presidential performances as multifaceted, and that we can understand this through the construction of various different personas. I will outline my rationale for this before looking at the specific case of Nicolas Sarkozy’s performance as a candidate in the 2007 presidential elections, outlining a few of the personas I have identified in my research and the wider implications this has for understanding image projection in the Fifth Republic.
Adam Agowun is a final-year PhD student at the University of Warwick. His thesis considers presidential image projection in the Fifth Republic, 1995-2017, and the various factors that have influenced and changed this.
Airelle Amédro: '''This staying clean shit isn’t easy''': Challenging harm regulation narratives through queer ethics of care in Virginie Despentes’s Dear Dickhead'
Published in English at the time of the Mazan trial, Virginie Despentes’s latest novel Dear Dickhead (2022) outgrew French borders reaching feminist conversations on a global scale. Set during the pandemic, the novel overlays discourses of addiction and sexual abuse in the current #MeToo era. Diverting from the frenetic nature of online justice, the novel’s epistolary form enables the main protagonist, Oscar, to re-evaluate his accountability for his sexual misconduct. Simultaneously, his accounts of the Narcotics Anonymous’ meetings help his correspondent to acknowledge her own addiction to drugs. Juxtaposing the educational and reparative support available to drug users with the current punitive approach to sexual misconduct, Despentes invites us to rethink the limited efficiency of retributive harm regulation techniques. Tending to Oscar’s comment ‘It’s a war we’re all fighting. This staying clean shit isn’t easy’, this paper, however, interrogates the disciplinary nature inherent to care narratives in the neoliberal context.
This paper discusses how Despentes’s fiction explores narratives of care in the current neoliberal landscape. While the author invites her readers to overcome the Manichean danger/pleasure discourse associated with sexual harm, Despentes’ characters at times flirt with what Oliver Davis (2019) defines as ‘pastoral governance’ when writing about drugs. Deciphering the fine line between reparative practices and oppressive disciplinary techniques, I suggest that a queer approach to harm regulation addresses the challenges posed by current moral panics concerning drugs and sex. Building Kane Race’s reading of queer drug consumption as a Foucauldian ‘technology of the self’ (2009), I argue that queer ethics of care, embracing the possibility of injury and risk and resisting neoliberal discourses of sanitation and respectability, might help us envision collective reparative strategies of harm reduction in the face of a coercive legal agenda.
Airelle Amédro (she/her) is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in French studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis analyses the proliferation of references to vulnerability and victimhood in contemporary queer French texts. She is currently guest editing the first special issue dedicated to Constance Debré for Modern and Contemporary France.
This event will take place in Warwick Faculty of Arts Building, room FAB3.30, 4.30-6pm.
Wednesday 28 January: Lili Owen Rowlands (Royal Holloway), 'Wood Working: Erotic Labour and the Intercorporeal in Recent French Cinema'
This paper braids together ideas about sex work, social reproduction and the body through the prism of three recent French films set in Paris’s park spaces: Le Bois dont les rêves sont faits (Claire Simon, 2015), Sauvage (Camille Vidal-Naquet, 2018) and Au cœur du bois (Claus Drexel, 2021). Drawing on studies of the haptic in cinema, and on Marxist-feminist theories that stress the function of physical touch to the reproduction of capital, I consider how all three films foreground the corporeal politics of erotic labour. These films, I suggest, deploy a formal sensuousness and self-reflexivity that draws the spectator towards an experience of shared physical existence with sex-working subjects — an approach that in turn unsettles prevailing assumptions about the usefulness of ‘care’ as an analytic framework.
Lili Owen Rowlands is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in French and Sexuality Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is working on her first book, Self-centred: Autotheory and Sexual Dissidence in Contemporary France and is co-editor of Rage: Affect and Resistance in French and Francophone Culture and Thought (Peter Lang, 2024). She writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the New Yorker.
This event will take place in Warwick Faculty of Arts Building, room FAB3.30, 4.30-6pm.
Wednesday 20 May: Daniel A. Gordon (University of Oxford), 'Anti-Fascist Resistance and its Limits: The Paris Riot of 21 June 1973'
On 15 June 1974, Kevin Gately, a Warwick University maths student, was killed during a protest against a public meeting by the National Front in central London. The closest equivalent to this tragic event on the other side of the Channel came one year earlier, in central Paris on 21 June 1973, when 5000 far left activists dressed in crash helmets and armed with Molotov cocktails and iron bars converged at Cardinal Lemoine metro, determined to prevent the holding of a public meeting at the Mutualité against so-called ‘uncontrolled immigration’ by the neo-fascist groupuscule Ordre nouveau. Ordre nouveau had recently taken the initiative to found a new political party, the Front national, direct ancestor of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national today. Calls across the Left for the government of Georges Pompidou to ban this inflammatory meeting were not heeded: a minority of Trotskyists and Maoists decided to take matters into their own hands, in a rare challenge to the French police’s habitual superiority in violence. The government’s response to the violent events of that night was to seek to create an equivalence between extremes of Left and Right by banning both Ordre nouveau and the Ligue communiste, the principal architects of 21 June, with the Ligue’s leaders arrested and imprisoned. This paper will show a microhistory of the events of 21 June 1973 might illuminate a wide variety of issues of larger concern, within and beyond the borders of France. The legacies of fascism, gender politics, the contesting and embodying of urban space, freedom of speech, policing tactics, the political culture of the Left, and the limits of political force were all contested during that midsummer night and its aftermath half a century ago. So how did contemporaries seek to answer such questions, in a world strangely familiar, yet also very different from our own? And was there a link from June 1973 in Paris to June 1974 in London, via the International Marxist Group’s solidarity with their French comrades? Drawing on new archival findings, this paper will seek to answer such questions.
Daniel A. Gordon is is an Associate Member of the History Faculty at Oxford University and a specialist in histories of migration, protest and cities in contemporary France. Author of Immigrants And Intellectuals: May ’68 And The Rise Of Anti-Racism in France (2012), details of his publications can be found at danielgordon.info.
This event will take place in Warwick Faculty of Arts Building, room FAB3.30, 5-6.30pm.
Wednesday 10 June: David Pettersen (Pittsburgh), 'Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - French Game Design Beyond jeux patrimoniaux'
Like contemporary, entertainment-oriented film and television production, video games are a global business in terms of where in the world games are made and the many markets and platforms they are designed to enter through simultaneous release. However, unlike film and television, and thanks to the increased localization affordances of gaming over those film and television (image, sound, and interface), the cultural or national identity of gaming can be more diffuse and mutable than in other forms of audiovisual media. Nevertheless, there are instances of national and regional schools of gaming, such as Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) that draw on adjacent media such as manga and anime, of which the Final Fantasy franchise (Square Enix, 1987-) is the best-known example. There is also an emerging dark fantasy and science fiction game tradition in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, known for the bleakness of visual and narrative design in games like CDProjektRed’s Witcher (2007-) and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) franchises or 11 Bit Studios’s The Alters (2025). National identity in games by North American companies pose some of the same cultural categorization challenges as Hollywood blockbusters. While US-inflected historical and geopolitical references have been the focus of US-produced games such as BioShock (2K Boston, 2007-2016), Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar, 2010-2018), or the Call of Duty franchise (Activision, 2003-), there are just as many examples of culturally non-specific games, such as Fortnite (Epic Games, 2020-), Minecraft (Mojang Studios, 2011-), or the Halo franchise (Bungie, 2001-).
While there are many well-known and successful French, or France-connected gaming companies, such as UbiSoft and Arkane Studios to mention just two, the number of culturally specific French video games is rather limited, and some of the most well-known instances have marked their Frenchness through appeals to history and heritage, such as Versailles (1997, Cryo Interactive) or Assassin’s Creed: Unity (2014, Ubisoft), set during the Revolution. Spiders’ Steelrising (2022) tried to reinvent the heritage game formula through a steampunk, Dark Souls-style take on clockwork automata fighting in the French Revolution; however, the game did not review or sell particularly well. Because of the high production costs for mid-range and AAA games, many of the games produced in part of wholly by French companies have opted for broad accessibility over cultural specificity.
The relatively small corpus of culturally French games is part of what makes Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025) such a striking case study for thinking about the question of Frenchness in video gaming. Against the backdrop of a steampunk-filtered Belle époque Paris, Expedition 33’s world is one seemingly ruled by a Paintress who erases all adults in the city Lumière when they reach a certain age. Magic and combat involve a mix of swords, spells, and cards that use chroma, or paint, as their substrate. The narrative arcs and quest design focus on playable characters who set out to overthrow the Paintress and thus change a world in which death comes too early.
While Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 draws at least visually on the historical period of Belle époque Paris, it also breaks with traditional heritage models in film, television, and previous games by radically transforming the historical setting through the lens of steampunk and fantasy RPG conventions. Nevertheless, despite these departures from what we could call jeux patrimoniaux, it is, I will argue, one of, if not, the most culturally French games produced to date through its use of motion capture performance in French as localization reference, its orchestral and operatic sound design and score, and the emphasis on art’s importance for human experience that is at the core of Expedition 33’s world design, gameplay, and narrative. Despite being Sandfall Interactive’s first game, made with a small team (for video games) and targeted for a niche audience, it achieved widespread popular and critical success in English, French, and other localized versions. Consequently, it offers important lessons for what a French school of video games could like beyond heritage and history, and it represents an important case study for examining the relevance that scholarly frameworks for discussing national identity hold for video games.
David Pettersen is Professor of French and Film and Media Studies and Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of French B-Movies: Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood (Indiana University Press, 2023) and Americanism, Media, and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France (University of Wales Press, 2016). His articles have appeared in French Screen Studies, Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, Modern & Contemporary France, and Romance Studies.
This seminar will take place on Microsoft Teams, 5-6.30pm UK time. Click here to join.