Dr Rebekah Vince, Ph.D. M.Res
Lecturer in French, HEA Fellow
Email: r.vince@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Arts One, Room 1.03
Website: https://movingmemoriestravellingtongues.wordpress.com/
Profile
I am a memory studies scholar specialising in French postmemory narratives, francophone postcolonial studies, and the Mediterranean francosphère. In 2018, I received a Wolfson-funded PhD from the University of Warwick, focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as depicted in literary texts by francophone North African authors. My monograph, tentatively entitled Unsettled Memories: Franco-Maghrebi Literature on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, is under contract with Liverpool University Press.
I came to Queen Mary University of London in 2020 as Lecturer in French. In 2023, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, where my research focus was on Etty Hillesum, a Dutch diarist of WWII in postcolonial perspective, through the lens of French-Algerian author Karima Berger. Before joining Queen Mary, I was an Early Career Fellow at Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study and a Teaching Fellow in French at Durham University. I was also a Visiting Scholar at the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative, Ghent University (Belgium) in 2017 and a Visiting Fellow at St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge in 2019. I am on the advisory board of the Memory Studies Association and a member of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies.
My research moves at the intersection between postcolonial studies, Jewish studies, and transnational French studies, engaging with dialogic approaches to memory. I am editor of the bilingual journal Francosphères (Liverpool University Press) and co-editor (with Hanna Teichler) of the book series Mobilizing Memories, published by De Gruyter Brill. The essay ‘Music of the Francospheres’ was jointly awarded the 75th anniversary French Studies essay prize on the future of French Studies, alongside Sura Qadiri’s essay ‘The Future is in the Making’. My recent work has introduced the concept of inter-doubt dialogue and I am currently exploring what I call ‘reharmonisations’ of French canonical literature, such as Baudelaire Jazz by Patrick Chamoiseau (see Postcolonial Francospheres: Reharmonising the French Canon | University of London).