Contact & People
Got a question? Don’t hesitate to get in contact with us.
Details of the ASMCF Executive Committee can also be found here.
People of ASCMF
Chris Tinker
President
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
Honorary Treasurer
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.
Chris O'Neill
Web Officer
Chris O'Neill
Chris O’Neill was awarded his PhD in 2019 from the School of Languages and Social Sciences at Aston University in Birmingham. His PhD thesis examines newspaper cartooning and the mechanisms of press control and censorship under Vichy. Other research interests include the French political system, Bande Dessinée, caricature, war in comics, representations of political figures in comics and France in the inter-war period. Chris joined the ASMCF Committee as Web Officer in 2017 and is also on the committee of International Bande Dessinée Society.
David Lees
Web Officer
David Lees
David Lees is Senior Teaching Fellow in French at the University of Warwick. David’s teaching and research is concerned with political communication and propaganda, especially audio-visual propaganda produced by the extreme-right in France. David is currently working on a book entitled Propaganda in Modern France for Palgrave Macmillan and his published work includes the edited collection (with Lindsey Dodd), Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime, 1939-1945, published with Bloomsbury in 2018. David is one of the co-editors of the Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture (2019) and also works on pedagogic research around teaching and learning Vichy France and the Holocaust. He also has interests in wellbeing and student peer mentoring. David was previously the postgraduate representative of the Association (2012-13) and Web Officer (2013-16).
Elizabeth Benjamin
Prizes Officer
Elizabeth Benjamin
Elizabeth Benjamin is a Lecturer in French at Coventry University. Her research interests intersect visual culture, comparative aesthetics, and cultural memory, with a particular interest in the early twentieth century. Her current work explores the role of memorialisation in the formation of national identity, analysed through art, literature, and culture more broadly. Other research interests include: the links between music, writing, and art; bande dessinée; archiving and silent film; economies of visual art; and the role of monuments and city spaces in the evolution of cultural memory. She is the author of Dada and Existentialism: the Authenticity of Ambiguity (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). Elizabeth joined the committee in 2018.
Fiona Barclay
Honorary Secretary
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.
Gill Allwood
Editor of the Association’s journal
Gill Allwood
Gill Allwood is Professor of Gender Politics at Nottingham Trent University and editor of the Association’s journal, Modern and Contemporary France. She has been a member of the ASMCF since she began her PhD in 1990 and has served both on the editorial board and the executive committee. She is also one of the editors, with Martin O’Shaughnessy and Denis Provencher, of the Liverpool University Press book series Studies in Modern and Contemporary France. Gill Allwood is the author of French Feminisms: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Theory (Taylor and Francis 1998) and, with Khursheed Wadia, Women and Politics in France (Routledge 2000), Gender and Policy in France (Palgrave 2009) and Refugee Women in Britain and France (MUP 2010).
Helen McKelvey
Postgraduate Representative
Helen McKelvey
Helen is a AHRC Northern Bridge DTP-funded student at Queen’s University, Belfast, having completed both her BA and MRes there. Her PhD project, supervised by Steven Wilson, Maeve McCusker and Martin Dubois, 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 joined the committee as a PG representative in 2019
Jan Windebank
Honorary Vice-President
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.
Madeleine Chalmers
Postgraduate Representative
Madeleine Chalmers
I am studying for a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at Trinity College in the University of Oxford, funded by the Oxford University AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership – Sir Ivor Roberts Graduate Scholarship. My research project explores how French literature and film of the Third Republic negotiate the increasingly tight imbrication of technology into human life, placing a historical corpus in dialogue with recent theoretical reflections on technology. I joined the Committee as Postgraduate Representative in 2017.
Maire Cross
Honorary Vice-President
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.
Steve Wharton
Honorary Vice-Secretary
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. Having served on the Executive 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 Occupied France and its legacy, contemporary LGBT activism in Britain and France, and political communication. He has served as Chair of Directors of Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution where he currently co-convenes its French Civilisation and Culture Group.
Timo Obergöker
Membership Secretary
Timo Obergöker
Timo Obergöker was born and raised in Germany and joined the UK and the University of Chester in 2013, first as a Senior Lecturer then as a Professor of French and Francophone Studies. Timo holds a PhD from the Université de Nancy 2 and a Habilitation à diriger des recherches from Clermont-Ferrand 2. His research focusses on Contemporary Literature from France and Québec (Écritures du non-lieu.Topographies d’une impossible quête identitaire : Romain Gary, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, Peter Lang, 2005 (2nd edition 2014, Les Lieux de l’extrême contemporain, Meidenbauer, 2011) and on colonialism and popular culture (Prise de possession. Storytelling, colonialisme et culture populaire, Königshausen und Neumann 2016). Timo currently works on a book on Postcolonial masculinity and on a series of articles on the roman national.