Contact & People

Chris Tinker

Chris Tinker is a Professor of French at the Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. His interests are in Media and Popular Music in France and Britain with particular focus on representations of generation/ageing, gender, nostalgia and charity. Chris is an active member of the ASMCF-affiliated French Media Research Group, co-organising with Hugh Dauncey (Newcastle) one-day conferences on Music and Media (FMRG18) and on Media, Memory & Nostalgia (FMRG22 & FMRG23). Chris is also currently a member of the Modern and Contemporary France Editorial Board and has co-edited themed issues of the journal on Representing Paris (with Alison Fell, 2000), on Youth Cultures in the Fifth Republic (with Wendy Michallat, 2007) and on Media, Memory & Nostalgia (with Hugh Dauncey, 2015). In 2014 Chris joined the ASMCF Executive Committee as Honorary Secretary.

Aude Campmas

I am a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Southampton. My current research interests include the relation between science and literature, and the representation of ‘the monstrous family’ in Francophone literature. I joined the committee in 2014.

Jordan McCullough

Jordan McCullough is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, working on the European Research Council-funded project ‘Assisted Dying in European Writing and Visual Culture: Reciprocal Interactions between Law, Medicine, and the Arts since 2000’. He was previously an early career researcher on the British Academy-funded Modern Languages Outreach and Engagement (MLOE) project, which sought to engage early career academics in research-driven outreach with primary and post-primary schools. He is also a Professional Associate with the Northern Ireland Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (NICILT) and has worked on a number of initiatives aimed at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 language learners. He joined the ASMCF committee, as Outreach Officer, in 2022.

Julia Thomaz

Julia Ribeiro Thomaz obtained her PhD in French Language and Literature from Université Paris Nanterre and History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection between History, Literature, Anthropology and the Digital Humanities. Her research interests are the poetry of the First World War, literary representations of armed conflict, and computational analysis of French poetry. She joined the ASMCF in 2022 as Conference Support Officer.

Jamie Steele

Dr. Jamie Steele is currently Senior Lecturer in Film & Screen Studies at Bath Spa University. Jamie’s research is primarily concerned with both French-language Belgian cinema and French cinema. His first monograph, Francophone Belgian Cinema, was published in 2019 as part of Edinburgh University Press’ Traditions in World Cinema series. Jamie has published journal articles and book chapters on a range of topics, such as national/ transnational cinema, Francophone Belgian film clusters, hubs and policy, François Ozon’s Dans la maison, and – more recently – populism in French cinema (forthcoming). He is currently working on an edited collection, analysing the films of the Dardenne brothers.

Fiona Barclay

Fiona Barclay is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Stirling. Her research interests lie in the postcolonial relationship between France and Algeria as it is represented in literature, film and media, and she has published extensively on issues of postcolonial memory, commemoration and haunting. She joined the Executive Committee in 2010 as co-organiser of the 2011 conference, and served as Membership Secretary from 2011 to 2016, when she became Honorary Secretary.

Helen McKelvey

Helen is a Lecturer in French Studies at University of Glasgow. She was awarded her PhD in 2021 from Queen’s University Belfast, with a thesis which examines the way in which slavery is represented through the use of religious imagery and narrative in nineteenth-century French novels and novellas, exploring how this reflects the involvement in the slave trade of various religious traditions from around the Atlantic Triangle. She currently teaches on a range of course looking at the Francophone Caribbean, particularly Haiti. She joined the committee as a PG representative in 2019, and rejoined the committee as Web Officer in 2021.

Jan Windebank

Jan Windebank is Professor of French and European Society in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield. She has published on a variety of topics concerning work, family, gender, social exclusion and social policy in France and in comparative European perspective in leading sociology, social policy, business and European studies journals and has published a number of books including Informal employment in the advanced economies (Routledge, with C.C. Williams) and Women and work in France and Britain (Macmillan, with A. Gregory). Jan currently co-edits the Journal of Contemporary European Studies and is co-organiser of the Centre for Gender Studies in Europe. Jan has been a member of ASMCF since commencing her PhD in 1985, sat on the Executive Committee in the early 90s and again since 2010, been a member of the Editorial Board of Modern and Contemporary France and organised two annual conferences in 1993 and 2006 in Sheffield. She has been President of the Association since 2013.

Maire Cross

I joined the association as a postgraduate in the 1980s and by 1985 was a member of the committee, serving as membership secretary from 1986 to 1988. I served on the editorial board from 1995 to 2005, and with Sheila Perry co-organised the 1995 conference held in Newcastle upon Tyne, where we inaugurated the custom of having a ceilidh after the conference dinner. I served as president until 2013. My chapter, ‘Sartre in Middlesex, De Beauvoir in Oxford: The Contribution of the ASMCF to the Study of France’, in: Lane, P., & Worton, M, eds, French Studies in and for the Twentieth Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011, pp. 272-288, was the first published history of the association. Since 2005 I have been Professor of French and head of department at Newcastle University. As a trustee of the Society for the Study of French History I was then president until 2017.

Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson is a PhD candidate in History at Durham University. His research interests lie in aftermaths and legacies of mass violence and persecution. For his PhD thesis, he is exploring emotion, spatial experiences and meanings of place in oral histories with survivors of the Holocaust in France. Having originally studied for an undergraduate degree in History with French at Durham, Mark recently returned to academic studies alongside a career in international education and research management. Before starting the PhD, he studied a master’s degree in History at Edinburgh University, where he developed his interest in oral history and the Holocaust. He became the Membership Secretary for the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France in 2023.

Cécile Guigui

Steve Wharton

Steve Wharton, Honorary Vice Secretary, is Senior Lecturer in French and Communication in the University of Bath’s Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies. He first joined the Executive Committee in 1992, serving subsequently as Hon Treasurer 1995-1998 and Hon Secretary 1998-2000. A member of the NEC of the AUT and then UCU 2000-2008 (being national AUT President 2005/06 and Joint President of UCU 2006/07), he returned to ASMCF Exec as Hon Treasurer in 2007 and then Hon Secretary 2008-2014. He researches political communication, Occupied France and its legacy, and contemporary LGBTIQ activism in Britain and France. A current member of the Board of Education Support, he was Chair of Directors of Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (2013-2019) and currently co-convenes its French Civilisation and Culture Group.

Oliver Davis

Oliver Davis, Executive Editor of Modern & Contemporary France, is Professor of French Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick. He joined the committee in 2020. To find out more about Oliver’s research, visit his institutional page: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/academic/od/

Ry Montgomery

Ry Montgomery is a PhD candidate in French at the University of Cambridge. Their PhD research investigates contemporary cinematic representations of trans* identities in relation to French republican universalism. They are also interested in queer practices of archiving and mapping, as well as questions of spatiality and memory in the films of Lionel Soukaz.

Fraser McQueen

Fraser McQueen is a lecturer in French Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, having previously held positions at the Universities of Stirling and Edinburgh. His research focuses on Islamophobia and community in contemporary French cultural production; current areas of interest include the cultural production of the far right and the mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy theories. He joined the ASMCF committee as an ordinary member in 2023.

Sara Mechkarini

Sara Mechkarini, an early career researcher, holds a PhD in Francophone Colonial and Postcolonial studies from the University of Birmingham, UK. Her thesis, entitled ‘Neither from here nor from there: The Alienation of the Evolué(e) in Anglophone and Francophone African Literature’, studies the literary depiction of colonial education and its cultural legacies for the indigenous population in both French and British former colonies. It focuses particularly on the complex role of assimilation and colonial education in shaping the identity of the colonial elite. Her research interests include Maghrebin literature, African literature, cultural legacies of colonialism, memory and commemoration.