ALASTAIR HEMMENS
MPhil Supervisor: Professor Andrew Hussey

Thesis Title: Life and Work of Raoul Vaneigem
Alastair Hemmens B.A. (English Literature, University College London) M.A. (Paris: History and Culture, University of London in Paris) Belgian writer and Situationist Raoul Vaneigem gave expression to a generation of angry youth unhappy with the merchant society we continue to experience today. During the events of May '68 his words could be seen scrawled all over the city of Paris and no Situationist text was more widely read than his The Revolution of Everyday Life. Though he was the most well known Situationist of the period and has continued to publish passionate poetic prose calling for the assertion of radical subjectivity and predicting the fall of Capitalism, his presence in critical literature on the Situationist International has remained largely anecdotal. This doctorate thesis will firmly place Vaneigem in our understanding of the SI and investigate his influence on post-war European culture.

SHINO KUROSAKI
PhD Supervisor: Dr Johannes Eckerth, King's College London.

Thesis Title: An Analysis of Knowledge and Use of English Collocations by French and Japanese Learners.
My PhD research involves an analysis of the knowledge and use of English collocations by French and Japanese learners. The main focus is on the tendencies that learners show in their answers to the different types of tasks. The data are based on my own list of collocations that were developed from the questionnaires provided with English native speakers.

LAURA OWEN
PhD Supervisor: Professor Hussey

Thesis Title: Life and Work of Colette Peignot
My principal area of research concerns Georges Bataille and Colette Peignot, otherwise known as 'Laure'. My PhD takes the reconfiguration and excavation of Laure and her texts within the contexts of the avant-garde and écriture féminine as focus. I have also presented conference papers in Tangier on both Joe Orton and William Burroughs, which links to my wider interest in post-colonialism and the Maghreb."

LOUISE ROGERS LALAURIE
http://louise.rogers.free.fr
MPhil Supervisor : Dr Anna-Louise Milne

Thesis Title: Art and Text
Louise Rogers Lalaurie is a qualified translator (member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, and the Society of Authors/Translators Association). She studied English Literature and History of Art at Queens' College, Cambridge (1986). As a part-time MPhil. student at ULIP, supervised by Anna-Louise Milne, her research explores the translation challenges posed by French livres d'artiste, in particular Henri Matisse's Florilège des Amours de Ronsard, published in 1948.

RUSSELL WILLIAMS

fr.linkedin.com/in/russellwilliamsuk

MPhil/PhD Supervisor: Professor Andrew Hussey

Working thesis title: Michel Houellebecq and transgression

My research is primarily concerned with the novels of contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Despite Houellebecq’s undoubted commercial success, his work has proved problematic from a critical perspective. His work has been attacked for many reasons including its supposed lack of literary style, for its explicit sex scenes and for the often unpalatable and unfashionable ideological viewpoints it presents.  As such, Houellebecq has been referred to variously as a provocative, even transgressive, writer

Through an examination of Houellebecq’s work from 1994’s Extension du domaine de la lutte, to 2010’s La Carte et le territoire, as well as reference to his critical writing and media interviews, my thesis will closely examine the transgressions in Houellebecq’s work, from the literary to the political, and what this reveals both about his novels and what it means to transgress.

With reference to writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Louis-Ferdinand de Céline and the Marquis de Sade and theorists such as Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, it will examine Houellebecq’s work against the background of French transgressive writing. I will also take into account Houellebecq’s  position within contemporary transgressive fiction, that of the so-called ‘contemporary extreme’, in French (including authors such as Virginie Despentes and Frédéric Beigbeder) and English (such as Bret Easton Ellis).

Additional research interests include critical theory, French cinema of the Nouvelle Vague and contemporary visual art.

YASMINA NAGNOUG MEJAI

MPhil Supervisor: Professor Andrew Hussey

Thesis title: “Border women”: writing between the Orient and the Occident. A comparative study of three contemporary Maghrebi female writers: Assia Djebar, Fatima Mernissi and Fawzia Zouari.

The aim of this comparative study is mainly to show the diversity and complexity of Arab women’s experiences in the Maghreb from the time of the French colonisation to nowadays. Maghrebi identity is a complex and multi-layered series of issues in terms of history, politics, culture, language, religion and gender.

Drawing on literary, linguistic, sociological, postcolonial feminist theories and cultural and identity studies, my project will examine a corpus of semi-autobiographical books by Djebar, Mernissi and Zouari. I will try to demonstrate that although the authors tackle similar issues – such as war, colonisation, patriarchy, woman emancipation – their perspectives and opinions diverge as they are all border women and feminists in their own way. This thesis will also explore the writers’ hybrid identities in relation to Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria’s hybrid culture, language and identity.