Annual Postgraduate Study Day 2025
RUPTURE(S)
University of Cambridge, 1st March 2025
To download the CfP in French and English, please click here: ASMCF-SSFH Post-Graduate Study Day 2025 CfP Final
Ruptures: moments when space and time are felt to break, when the historical present becomes clearly splintered, when relations and orientations are transformed, and memories are radically altered. These moments may give rise to new possibilities, scenarios and alternative futures. They present either a sharp crack through history or arrive so softly one doesn’t realise change is happening. They may be as vast as international conflicts, revolutions or ecological crises, or as minutely local as a death in the family, the break up of a community or a turning point in one’s own life.
2025 brings with it the anniversaries and legacies of historical ruptures: the émeutes of 2005, the loi Veil of 1975, the end of the Second World War in 1945, and the institution of laïcité in 1905. These moments continue to structure both the popular and historiographical imagination, constituting touchstones from which to create new perspectives and challenge old hierarchies. These questions resonate, too, with the critical exigencies of our present conjuncture, compelled as we are to address the violence(s) of colonialism, neofascism and neoliberal capital. Thinking with “rupture(s)” invites us to consider our own responsibilities toward, and complicity in, those structures aimed at division and oppression – and, by extension, how we might mobilise against them.
Through this Study Day, we aim to ask whether the lens of “rupture(s)” constitutes a viable hermeneutic through which to understand historical events and cultural works. Or, on the contrary, is it a post-facto product of calling an event “historical”? Does scale or perspective impact our idea of what makes a rupture? Do ruptures represent unbridgeable gaps, or should they be understood as fluid processes?
This Study Day is open to all PGRs and MA students working in the fields of modern French studies and French historical studies. Papers in either French or English are invited on a broad range of topics, which could include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Political ruptures: movements, oppositions, revolutions, and nationhood
- Social ruptures: class, race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and disability
- Geographies of rupture: exclusion, containment, and integration
- Legacies of rupture: commemoration and oubli
- Points of departure: on the generative potential of breaks and ruptures
- Ir/reparability: the politics of reparation, perpetuation and reprisals
- Representations: the symbols and imagery of rupture(s)
- Thought and knowledge: epistemic, historiographical, and philosophical shifts
- Methodologies: “rupture” as hermeneutic; scale and perspective
We will also be pleased to consider proposals for complete panels on one or more of these themes. These should include abstracts for each proposed paper (3 or 4), and the details of the proposed chair (who should not be one of the speakers).
Abstracts of no more than 250 words, in either English or French, should be sent to asmcf.ssfh.pgstudyday@gmail.com. Submissions should be received by 9:00 AM (GMT) on 10 January 2025.
The Study Day will take place in person at the University of Cambridge on Saturday, 1 March 2025. Attendees will be able to claim up to £100 for travel and accommodation expenses, with priority given to those participants who will deliver a paper during the Study Day, thanks to the generous support from the SSFH and ASMCF.
The Study Day will include professional development panels and an opportunity to engage with senior academics from a range of institutions. Attendance is free but all attendees are kindly requested to register to become members of at least one of the organising societies in advance of the Study Day.