Academic & Teaching staff

Professor of French Cultural History Alison Fell

Professor of French Cultural History

Professor of French Cultural History Alison Fell

0113 343 8879

Biography

I was an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Birmingham. After a year spent in Lyon as a lectrice, I was a lecturer at The Queen's College, Oxford and Lancaster University before coming to Leeds in 2007.

Teaching

In addition to teaching language, I'm co-director (with Paul Rowe) of 'Aspects of French History' (Level 2), and director of the Level 3 module 'French Culture and the First World War'. I'm also the convenor for the Level 1 course 'Introduction to French Studies: Resistance and Desire'.

Research

I began my research career working on C20th French women's writing, which resulted in a book on representations of motherhood in the autobiographical works of Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc and Annie Ernaux. For the last few years, my research interests have shifted to a more historical focus on women's experiences in, and cultural representations of, the First World War.

I am currently researching a monograph entitled Back to the Front: Women as Veterans in France and Britain, 1916-1933 In addition, I am co-directing a Wellcome Trust funded collaborative research project investigating the image and experience of female nurses during the First World War.

I am chair of a Steering Group managing a series of research projects and outreach activities with cultural partners in Leeds and Yorkshire focusing on the centenary of the First World War in 2014-18.

Potential areas for supervision

Women and war; French culture and the First World War; French women's writing

Books

Back to the Front: Women as Veterans in France and Britain, 1916-1933 (forthcoming 2013)

Annie Ernaux:  La Place and La Honte (Grant and Cutler Critical Guides to French Texts, 2006)

Liberty, Equality, Maternity in Beauvoir, Leduc and Ernaux (Legenda, 2003)

Edited books and journal issues

Alison S. Fell and Christine Hallett (eds), Visions and Revisions: Studies in First World War Nursing (Routledge, forthcoming 2012)

Alison S. Fell and Edward Welch (eds), 'Annie Ernaux : Socio-ethnologist of contemporary France', special issue of Nottingham French Studies (Autumn 2009)

Alison S. Fell (ed.), Les Femmes francophones face à la guerre / French and francophone women facing war (Peter Lang, 2009)

Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-1919 (Palgrave, 2007)

Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds), special double issue of Minerva: Women and War (Spring and Autumn 2007)

Book chapters

'Germaine Malaterre-Sellier, la Grande Guerre et le féminisme des années 20' (forthcoming 2012)

'The nurse in the commemorative landscape of interwar France', in Alison S. Fell and Christine Hallett (eds), Visions and Revisions: Studies in First World War Nursing (Routledge, forthcoming 2012)

'Beyond the bonhomme Banania: Lucie Cousturier's encounters with tirailleurs sénégalais during the First World War', in Alisa Miller, Laura Rowe and James Kitchen (eds.), Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011)

'Nursing the Other: the representation of colonial troops in French and British First World War nursing memoirs', in Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

'Introduction', in Les Femmes francophones face à la guerre / French and francophone women facing war (Peter Lang, 2009) ;

'Introduction: The Women's Movement and the First World War', in The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives 1914-1919, ed. Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (Palgrave, 2007)

'French women do not wish to talk about peace': Julie Siegfried and the response of the CNFF to the First World War', in The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives 1914-1919, ed. Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (Palgrave, 2007)

'Fallen Angels: The Red Cross Nurse in French First World War Discourse', in The Resilient Female Body: Health and Malaise in Twentieth Century France, ed. Maggie Allison and Yvette Rocheron (Peter Lang, 2007)

Journal articles

'Myth, countermyth and the politics of memory: Vera Brittain and Madeleine Clemenceau Jacquemaire's interwar nurse memoirs', Synergies, no 3 Année 2010, special issue on 'The War in the Interwar/La Guerre dans l'entre-deux', ed. Martyn Cornick

'Intimations of Mortality: Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie's L'Usage de la photo as breast cancer narrative', Nottingham French Studies special issue on Annie Ernaux, ed. Alison S. Fell and Edward Welch (2009)

'Finding a Voice: Feminists, Nationalism and the First World War', Minerva: Journal of Women and War 1:2 (2007) introduction to special issue on women and World War I, ed. Alison S. Fell, 63-5

'Life after Léa: War and Trauma in Colette's La Fin de Chéri', French Studies, 59 (2005), 495-508

Recent Publications