Emma Wilson | |
---|---|
Born | 1967 (age 56–57) |
Nationality | British |
Occupation(s) | Academic, writer |
Parent | Jacqueline Wilson |
Awards | Ordre des Palmes académiques (Chevalier, 2009) |
Academic background | |
Education | Surbiton High School |
Alma mater | Newnham College, University of Cambridge (BA, Ph.D) |
Thesis | The pain of the pleasure of the text: Tournier, reading and sexuality (1991) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Cambridge |
Emma Wilson, FBA (born 1967) is a British academic and writer,specialising in French literature and cinema. She is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. [1]
Emma Wilson is the daughter of novelist Jacqueline Wilson and her former husband,William Millar Wilson,a police officer. [2] She was a scholarship student at Surbiton High School [3] and then studied French and Latin as an undergraduate at Cambridge. She then stayed on to do a PhD in the French department. Her thesis was entitled The pain of the pleasure of the text:Tournier,reading and sexuality. [4]
Wilson then got a post as a university lecturer at Cambridge. She is a fellow of Corpus Christi College,Cambridge,and Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge. [5] She was previously Reader in Contemporary French Literature and Film and head of Cambridge's Department of French. [1]
In 2022,she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA),the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [6]
As a researcher,Wilson is author of six books and over twenty articles published in scholarly journals in the field of modern languages and film. Her published work includes book studies of Alain Resnais and Krzysztof Kieslowski as well as specific work on writers such as Marcel Proust,Marguerite Duras,Hélène Cixous and Michel Tournier. As well as her contribution to these author fields,however,Wilson's writing has applications to critical theory. In her 1996 work,Sexuality and the Reading Encounter,Wilson makes a contribution to reader response theory in relation to feminism and queer theory. She argues for the potential for change in the reader's identity through reading. The encounter between reader and text,she says,depends "not on pre-constructed identities,but on the very performance of identity in the process of reading." [7] Wilson is particularly interested in the way that readers position themselves in relation to representations of desiring relations. [8]
Wilson's 2003 study of the cinematic treatment of missing children,Cinema's Missing Children,was described as "a book rich in academic and cultural backstory". [9]
On 6 May 2009,Wilson was awarded an Ordre des Palmes académiques Chevalier (knight) medal by the French Ambassador to the United Kingdom,Maurice Gourdault-Montagne. This prestigious award is awarded by the French government to academics and educators. It recognises Wilson's sustained contribution to the dissemination of French culture and to education. [10] As well as her active contribution to the teaching and research of her department,Wilson has set up a number of links between Cambridge University and French institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure-Lettres et Sciences humaines in Lyon with which Cambridge now has a very successful ERASMUS programme.
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation.
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
Three Colours: Blue is a 1993 psychological drama film co-written and directed by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski. It is the first instalment in the Three Colours trilogy, themed on the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, followed by White and Red. According to Kieślowski, the subject of the film is liberty, specifically emotional liberty, rather than its social or political meaning.
Krzysztof Kieślowski was a Polish film director and screenwriter. He is known internationally for Dekalog (1989), The Double Life of Veronique (1991), and the Three Colours trilogy (1993 –1994). Kieślowski received numerous awards during his career, including the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1988), FIPRESCI Prize, and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (1991); the Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize (1989), Golden Lion (1993), and OCIC Award (1993); and the Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear (1994). In 1995, he received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Irène Marie Jacob is a French-Swiss actress known for her work with Polish film director Krzysztof Kieślowski. She won the 1991 Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress for the Kieślowski film The Double Life of Veronique, and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her 1994 film Three Colours: Red. Her other film appearances include The Secret Garden (1993), Beyond the Clouds (1995), U.S. Marshals (1998), and Eternity (2016).
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory. Sedgwick published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of queer theory, and her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies, in which she was one of the most influential figures. Sedgwick's essays became the framework for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and gay studies.
Jouissance is a French language term held untranslatable into English.
The Double Life of Veronique is a 1991 drama film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski and starring Irène Jacob and Philippe Volter. Written by Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, the film explores the themes of identity, love, and human intuition through the characters of Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Despite not knowing each other, the two women share a mysterious and emotional bond that transcends language and geography.
Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa". Cixous aimed to establish a genre of literary writing that deviates from traditional masculine styles of writing, one which examines the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text. This strand of feminist literary theory originated in France in the early 1970s through the works of Cixous and other theorists including Luce Irigaray, Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, and has subsequently been expanded upon by writers such as psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger. who emerged in this field in the early 1990s,
Linda Ruth Williams is a professor of Film Studies in the department of Communications, Drama, and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. Her special interests include sexuality and censorship in cinema and literature, women in film, psychoanalytic theory and D. H. Lawrence.
Susan Sellers is a British author, translator, editor and novelist. She was the first woman to be made a professor in the field of English literature as well as creative writing at the University of St Andrews, and is co-General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Virginia Woolf.
Three Colours: Red is a 1994 drama film co-written, produced and directed by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski. It is the final installment of the Three Colours trilogy, which examines the French Revolutionary ideals; it is preceded by Blue and White. Kieślowski had announced that this would be his final film, planning to retire claiming to be through with filmmaking; he would die suddenly less than two years later. Red is about fraternity, which it examines by showing characters whose lives gradually become closely interconnected, with bonds forming between two characters who appear to have little in common.
Barbara Bray was an English translator and critic.
Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite is a 1980 English-language translation of Herculine Barbin's nineteenth-century memoirs, which were originally written in French. The book contains an introduction by Michel Foucault, which only appears in the English-language translation of the memoirs. Foucault discovered Barbin's memoirs during his research about hermaphroditism for The History of Sexuality.
Poststructural feminism is a branch of feminism that engages with insights from post-structuralist thought. Poststructural feminism emphasizes "the contingent and discursive nature of all identities", and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities.
Epistemology of the Closet is a book published in 1990 by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who is considered one of the founders of queer studies. The book tackles the question of what makes up human sexuality.
Martine Beugnet is a French film theorist, and a Professor in Visual Studies at the Paris Diderot University. She has written primarily on corporeality and sensation in avant-garde and narrative cinema, and has had her work published in several film journals. She wrote her PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh in 1999, on themes of sexuality and bodies in recent French cinema, citing filmmakers such as Claire Denis, Bertrand Blier, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Laetitia Masson, and Leos Carax. She later wrote an entire monograph on the work of Claire Denis, where she invoked the film theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In 2005, she published a book on cinematic treatments of Marcel Proust, written in collaboration with Marion Schmid. Two years later, she wrote a book titled Cinema and Sensation, where she further explored themes she had written about in her PhD thesis, again invoking Deleuze.
Carol Jane Mavor is an American writer and professor. Her work includes the books Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, and Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour. She is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester.
Michel Tournier is a collection of essays edited by Michael Worton, about the French author Michel Tournier, published in 1995 by Longman.