Academic & Teaching staff

Dr Claire Launchbury

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Dr Claire Launchbury

+44 (0)113 343 3485

BA (Exeter); MPhil (NUI); PhD (London)

Claire Launchbury was born in Swindon. She studied music initially at Exeter University, then continued her studies at University College Cork before undertaking her doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London, which was awarded in 2009. Her thesis investigated constructions of French cultural memory at the BBC during the Second World War through broadcasts of music, poetry and political programmes.

Teaching

She taught at the IUT Ville d'Avray (lectrice) and at Université Paris-Sorbonne (chargée de cours). She was a tutor at University College Cork and Royal Holloway. Claire recently took part in an Erasmus teaching mobility scheme by giving lectures and seminars in the département de littérature française at Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. This forms part of an ongoing project to strengthen the partnership between our two institutions first established by colleagues in Cultural Studies at Leeds with the leading research centre d'études féminines et d'études de genre at Saint-Denis. Claire was a visiting lecturer at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut in May 2011 and will be once again in May 2012.

At Leeds, Claire teaches on the course Post-Holocaust Cultures in France (level 3) with Professor Max Silverman and has organised a series of interdisciplinary research seminars on forgetting in postwar and postcolonial societies.

Research 

Claire's research is informed by an interest in the interactions between literature, music and the implications of the archive in cultural memory with a particular concentration on how cultural production is influenced by political conflict, colonialism and concomitant traumas. A revised version of her thesis entitled Music, Poetry, Propaganda: Constructing French Cultural Soundscapes at the BBC during the Second World War was published with Peter Lang in their Modern French Identities series. In 2010, she organised the colloquium 'Unsettling Scores: French musico-poetics from Banville to Duras' supported by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre and the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway. The colloquium investigated the disturbing and sometimes difficult encounter with music in French literature. A selection of presented papers in addition to newly commissioned articles is currently under preparation for publication in a special issue of Romance Studies concentrating on Proust and Music co-edited with Áine Larkin.

As Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Claire is examining the critical and aesthetic potential of the archive in Francophone literature and cultural production (autobiography, poetry and fiction, civil-led projects) that attest to trauma resulting from the Lebanese civil war (1975-1991) in her project entitled 'Countering l'amnésie collective in postwar Lebanon'. 

Claire has been an invited guest on BBC Radio 3's Opera on Three to participate in the presentation of Gustave Charpentier, Louise (Paris), Massenet, Manon and Gounod's Roméo et Juliette and Faust at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Member of the Film and Visual Cultures Research Group; Cultural Studies Research Group and director of the Centre for French and Francophone Cultural Studies.

Publications

  • Music, Poetry, Propaganda: Constructing French Cultural Soundscapes at the BBC during the Second World War, Modern French Identities vol. 78 (Oxford; Bern: Peter Lang, 2012) 223pp. ISBN:  9783034302395 
  • 'Unsettling Scores: Musico-Poetics in Proust', ed. with Áine Larkin, special issue of Romance Studies (forthcoming). 
  • 'Introduction' and 'Les Demoiselles du téléphone: Music and suffering in Proust, Cocteau and Duras' in Romance Studies.
  • 'Cityscape, Timescape, Soundscape: Wartime Paris, London, and the aural poetics of urban space' in Listening to modernity: New sonic worlds in the wake of the phonograph ed. by Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (project submitted to Oxford University Press for publication in 2012).
  • 'Animating Memory: Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir' in Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation 1945 to 1985 ed. by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (London: I B Tauris, forthcoming).
  • 'Transmitting French cultural memory at the BBC during the Second World War: The Case of Éluard and Poulenc' in Conflict, Memory and Memorialisation: War and European Culture in the Twentieth Century ed. by Rachel Cowgill, Terry Phillips and Guy Tourlamain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming)
  • Music in Translation: Representations of 'Frenchness' in BBC Feature Broadcasts during the Second World War, Franco-British Studies 37 (2006/7), 35-56.  
  • Reviewed for La Revue de musicologie, French Studies, Notes and Fontes Artes Musicæ

Invited Lectures and Seminars 

  • Le futur de mon temps: Topographies of dwelling and belonging in women's Francophone writing of the Lebanese war', Birkbeck Research Seminar on Representations of Kinship and Community, 23 February 2011.
  • Music, Poetry, Propaganda: Constructing French Cultural Soundscapes at the BBC during the Second World War', War and Memory Research Seminar, Queen's University Belfast, 14 October 2010 and at the Centre for Second World War Studies, University of Birmingham, 22 March 2011.
  • 'Douleurs exquises: Music, Telephones and Tears transgressed in Cocteau/Poulenc, Duras and Fassbinder', Bird Colloquium, Dept of Music, University of Cardiff, 16 February 2010.
  • 'Music of Poetry and Truth: The BBC's premier of Poulenc's Figure humaine, 25 March 1945', Group for War and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster, 23 May 2007.

Conferences

  • 'Beyrouth palimpseste' at Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Annual Conference, Institut français, London (November 2011).
  • 'L'État du témoin dans Quatre heures à Chatila', Colloque international du Centenaire de Jean Genet, Paris-Sorbonne and École normale supérieure, 16-17 December 2010.
  • Music, Poetry, Propaganda: Transmitting French Cultural Memory at the BBC during the Second World War' at Conflict, Memory, Memorialisation, Liverpool Hope University, 17-18 July 2010.
  • The Archive and Collective Amnesia: Animating Memories of the Lebanese Civil War', at Archive: British Comparative Literature Association triennial conference, University of Kent, 5-8 July 2010.
  • 'Douleurs Exquises: Tears, Telephones and Music transgressed in Cocteau/Poulenc, La Voix humaine, and Duras, La Musica deuxième' at Unsettling Scores: French Musico-Poetics from Banville to Duras, Royal Holloway, University of London, 11 June 2010.
  • 'Animating Music and Memory in the Context of Collective Amnesia: Beirut 1982' at the Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum, Institute of Musical Research, University of London, 7 May 2010.
  • 'Animating Memory in the Context of Collective Amnesia: Beirut 1982', at Postcolonial Memory: Resistance, Representation, and Revival, Royal Holloway, University of London, 18 September 2009.
  • Animated Memory: Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir' at Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation 1945-1985, University of Leeds, 24 March 2009.
  • 'Francis Poulenc in Paris and London: The politics of music presentation during World War Two' at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Nashville Tennessee, 5 November 2008.
  • Réhabilitation, témoignage et transfiguration: nouvelles perspectives sur Figure humaine de Francis Poulenc', at Journées d'études de la Société française de musicologie, Université de Metz, 13 September 2008.
  • 'Figures of Humanity: Rehabilitation, Testimony and Transfiguration', at Society for French Studies Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, 1 July 2008. 
  • 'La Voix humaine désincarnée et un Narcisse en Bakélite: le téléphone et son opéra' at Voix et Savoir: Entendre les textes, Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail, 6 June 2008.
  • 'Programming Repertoire for Wartime Broadcasts at the BBC: The Case of Le Quatorze juillet 1943', at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Los Angeles, California, 5 Nov 2006.